A Case Study of the Factors Associated with Using the F# Programming Language for Software Test Automation

Functional programming languages, which emphasize a paradigm in which code modules return a value, have traditionally been used primarily in research and academia rather than in commercial software development and testing. This paper presents the results of a case study which investigated the use of a functional programming language for writing software test automation. Several software test engineers with significant procedural programming experience, but minimal functional programming experience, were given a short training class which focused on writing test automation using the F# functional programming language. Survey results suggested that the technical factors (such as immutability and pipelining) associated with test automation written using a functional programming language were less important than the subjective factors (such as the similarities between programming paradigms), and that the use of a functional programming language may provide indirect value to a software testing effort.