Last 24-25th october I went to SoftShake conference in Geneva. The conference was very interesting and was happy to see a lot of source code and live coding/demos. I was given the chance to make a presentation about automations of functional tests with Robot Framework. Here follows some feedback on it.

The slides can be found bellow though it misses what I consider being the most interesting part: live coding.  To show practical examples of code, I wrote some tests with Jenkins as a SUT. Those are very simple tests but that helped people to get a better idea of what kind of test can be written with Robot. Those little tests can be found in Github. I used fswatch to have the tests be executed every time I would save the tests. So with a split screen code+robot it was looking like an infinitest setup.

Questions I got after the presentations are worth noting as they give some information about what people care/think when they discuss tests automation:

1) Is it possible to have variables in the middle of a Robot Framework keyword? Question arose because in the Robot code I showed and wrote, I always write :

keyword argument1 argument2
ex/ file should exist in folder    file name    directory name

where in fact I should use the facility offered by Robot to put argument inside keywords like described in the documentation. This helps ending up with tests that are easier to read. Here is a simple example:

*** test cases ***
Embedding arguments into keyword name
number 2 and 2 should be equal

*** Keywords ***
number ${x} and ${y} should be equal
should be equal ${x} ${y}

2) “With a tool like Robot Framework, are QA supposed to commit the tests in the SCM?”. Answer is yes as the tool makes the more sense when integrated in a continuous integration environment that will retrieve the tests in an SCM. But the question is worth asking because in my previous company, having QA using the SCM was not an obvious step to make. With some non-technical rather-functional QA we might have a group that is more at ease with Office documents and filesystems than with developer tools. Personally, I consider using the same tool is also a very good opportunity to make the QA and Dev team be closer. (further reading on this topic: “Technical artifacts including test automation and manual regression test scripts (if any) belong in the Source Control System versioned with the associated code” by Elisabeth Hendrickson)

3) is it possible to write keywords in Java rather than Python. Answer is yes, although I consider Python to be a good choice and more homogenous with the syntax used in Robot DSL.

4) finally, there were several questions about what “component tests” are and what entry points could be used in the SUT to write such tests. My definition of component tests is rather shallow: everything that is between unit tests and end-2-end tests! That’s enough an explanation for developer-type people who can envision a REST API for example. That is more complicated to grasp for non-technical QA or managers. I was, once more, surprised to see that for many people they were 2 obvious way to test a product: unit tests written by developers (white box testing) and gui-driven-tests written by QA (black box testing)… Some more evangelism to do for gray box testing I guess!

So this was good opportunity to share my experience of Robot and to be challenged with unexpected questions is a very good way to progress. So I might be back with other sessions in the future…