A generic framework design to enhance capabilities of an enterprise test automation framework

This paper illustrates the design and implementation of a generic framework that can be used to enhance the capabilities of an existing automation test framework. This generic framework is used to support parsing test data, from files of all formats which are often used in the test execution phase. The paper distinguishes the test phase into a pre-execution, execution and validation, and post-execution phase. The generic framework employs web services to parse the test data from different file types into a JSON output array in the pre-execution phase, uses a validation JSON to validate the test results from multiple sources during the test execution phase and subsequently implements the web-service to update test results from files (supporting different formats) into the database thus facilitating, publishing results onto a comprehensive dashboard. The method of implementing this generic framework as a plugin, further enables different automation teams to leverage a single test automation framework to execute multiple test cases independently with different types of inputs irrespective of the applications in test and eventually showcasing all the test results onto a common dashboard for analysis and tracking purposes.