XML data representation for testing automation

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) technologies seem to offer solutions for a wide range of automated testing issues. In fact, these technologies are very promising to address scalability and interoperability among distributed software applications and to facilitate reuse ensuring data coherency, completeness and reliability. In this paper we discuss the use of XML for representing the whole set of information regarding configuration and classification data involved with a software environment for test automation. Thus we introduce a case study where the effectiveness of this approach was used to face the automated testing of telecommunication device.