Guest Post: Designing a Ruby-based Sauce Test Automation Framework

Designing a Ruby-based Sauce Test Automation Framework – The What and the Why

When we start developing regression test suites for our codebase, we encounter issues such as code duplication, repetition of setup code, searching for required section of code from actual test code, managing different layers of tests such as field level, section level, page level and application level test code. A good test automation framework is built keeping the above design issues in mind. In this blog, we will cover why we should use Page Object Pattern, a design pattern in a test automation framework. We will then create a simple test suite in Ruby to implement this pattern and try executing it on Saucelabs.

The Page Object Pattern Defined:

Every test code that you write will comprise of several components – first the code needed to navigate through and interact with the elements of the page that you want to test. Then, there is the actual test code itself that reviews the content of the page and verifies if the actual results seen on the page matches with the expected results. The architecture of this framework comprises of the following building blocks:

1. Tests
2. Actions
3. Pages
4. Page Elements

Class Diagram:

Advantages

The advantage of using such a framework is the clear segregation of the functions across the various classes. For instance, now our Test classes will only have to verify and assert test conditions. While the Action classes will handle the required action steps to be taken on the page such as retrieving values or inserting / updating values to change the current state of the system. And the Page classes will manage the interactions of the elements within it with the help of Action or Test classes. This framework also offers the advantages of reusability and maintainability of the test codebase in the long run. (In our further blogs in this series, we will look at implementing a Simple Test Framework on Ruby using Page Object Pattern. We will also write a few simple test cases.)

This guest post was written by Vinodh Balaji Sridharan and Ganesh Kaliannan, Neev Technologies.