How might I present how an automation framework can help teams?

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kumarnarayanan

Hi Connections, I am new here. Request your help on one topic. I need to do a presentation where I need to explain how the automation framework in one project can help other teams within the organization. Please help

kindly help on this

katepaulk

I can think of a few ways where a framework for one project could help in other projects - could you perhaps post this to the forum rather than chat, because it's going to need a rather long answer, at least from me.

I’ve pulled this into a new topic thread for some long-form replies. Hope that helps @kumarnarayanan and @katepaulk.

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I’m assuming here that your framework is relatively advanced and has a lot of helper/utility routines that can be used - since I don’t know anything about your organization, I’ll use examples I’m familiar with.

The biggest way an automation framework can help other teams with different projects is that it provides a structure to work with. That is, the helper routines to do things like connect to a database (if needed), open data files and use them, close dialogs, interact with common page widgets and so forth are all there.

For instance, for a web application, the framework could provide a set of convenience methods to locate form fields by Id, Name, Attribute - this is particularly helpful if the web application is built with one of those frameworks that autogenerates a lot of the standard HTML attributes but has its own set of attributes which don’t change every time - and so on. It could also include ways to interact with dropdowns that don’t use HTML selects.

For data driven tests, the framework could provide the input structure needed for the data, and all the code necessary to pull the data into the tests. That frees the automators from creating the back-end code they need, and lets them focus more on the kind of data they’re going to use.

A mature page object model framework (or possible widget-object, if the application in test has a lot of modules that get reused across multiple pages, provides a pre-built structure as well as guidance to automators for their projects.

If the language you’ve used allows multiple projects in a solution, keeping the framework project separate from the test project means that it can be updated and added to by all automators across all teams, allowing for more efficient resource management.

Essentially, a well-designed automation framework can be used as the skeleton of a new automation project, reducing the amount of code automators need to write to get their project running, which allows them to spend more time focusing on choosing their tests more carefully and building a better project.

As an added advantage, anyone moving between teams is going to be familiar with the structure of the automation if the same framework is being used by all the automation teams.

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