Audvik Labs

ROBOT FRAMEWORK

Robot Framework is an open-source test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development.

 It follows different test case styles – keyword-driven, behavior-driven, and data-driven for writing test cases. This feature makes it very easy to understand. Test cases are written using keyword style in a tabular format. 

Robot Framework provides good support for external libraries, tools that are open source and can be used for automation. 

The most popular library used with Robot Framework is Selenium Library used for web development & UI testing.

 

 

In this Automation Testing Framework, test scripts are initially recorded by “Record & Playback” method. Later, common tasks inside the scripts are identified and grouped into Functions. These Functions are called by main test script called Driver in different ways to create test cases.

This Framework is a generic test automation framework. It uses a keyword-driven syntax to create test scripts with this easy to interpret syntax, the scripts are very easy to read even by less technical people.

ATAF(Audviklabs Test Automation Framework) is an in-house tool which developed and modified using the Robot framework. It’s customized according to the client’s requirement 

It used extensively as a test tool for acceptance of test-driven development (ATDD) in a variety of applications, and increasingly also for Robotic Process Automation.

ATAF provides tools to write, execute and orchestrate software robots that are powered by Robot Framework to be used in RPA.

Unlike Cucumber and other automation frameworks, hybrid framework comes with a set of standard test libraries to ease the interaction with the operating system, provide common assertions, and more. 

Since it is built in Python, it can be used and further extended using Python or Java.

Libraries are the standard mechanism to extend Robot Framework, even though there are more.

 In fact, a strong community around Robot continuously increases the number of available libraries and resources for Robot Framework.

Test libraries provide their own keywords; a well-known library is SeleniumLibrary that allows automation of browser interactions using Selenium/WebDriver.

It has greattooling in Visual Studio 2017. With a few clicks you can set up your Service Fabric container package, complete with configuration files and a deployment script. And you can then deploy it to your cluster right from Visual Studio just as easily.

To get started with Robot Framework basically you need Python and pip installed. If you have the environment properly configured you can just execute the installation command lines:

pip install robotframework pip install robotframework-appiumlibrary

After you have installed Robot Framework, you can take a look at the example where we use our Bitbar Sample Application with very basic Robot Framework test examples.

For the cloud run, you basically need a Python script and shell script that makes sure the test execution on the cloud end works fine. For instance, you need to add the pip installation in your shell script to ensure everything gets properly installed on your cloud session as well.

Next, you will create a simple test case that allows you to search for any flight. This will be a UI test; hence we need a tool that will help you manipulate the elements on a web page. Selenium WebDriver will suit this purpose as it’s open-source, stable and easy to use.

Selenium WebDriver gives us as test developers a simple programming interface to interact with graphical elements on web pages. The only thing you need to do is to choose the appropriate WebDriver depending on the browser you would like to use.

With Robot Framework, you can easily write automated test scripts. Keywords are used to perform actions but also to provide assertion mechanisms. They can receive arguments as a means to condition their behavior.

In the case of the RF, the editor can be anything, ranging from the simplest of text editors to a full-blown IDE. The Robot Framework comes with various editors, such as the RF Integrated Development Environment (RIDE), and with several plug-ins for popular IDE’s and text editors such as Eclipse, IntelliJ, Atom, TextMate or even Vim. But of course, you could also use a separate text editor, such as Notepad++. Which editor to use may depend on factors such as the required complexity of the test code, the layers to which one has to contribute (e.g. high-level test cases or re-usable, low-level test functions), the skill set of the involved automaton engineers (which may be business stakeholders, testers or developers) or simply personal taste.

 

Depending on the editor used, you may additionally benefit from features such as code completion, syntax highlighting, code extraction, test cases management and debugging tools.

Robot Framework offers a great deal of flexibility and can either use the pure keyword driven syntax, or it can be used as a behaviour driven framework.

Robot Framework is a very powerful and versatile test tool for test automation. It has some very nice out of the box features which can get you very far. If you’re still lacking functionality or libraries, you can easily import custom libraries or create your own libraries using Java, Python or .NET. Getting started in Robot Framework and setting up a full e2e framework can be tricky at first, but the rewards will be plentiful.

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