When embarking on the creation of a new automation framework, several critical aspects come into play. Among the foundational pillars underpinning its success is the architecture. The efficacy of a test automation framework hinges on the intricacies of its architecture and how its implementation influences performance. Let’s delve into the key considerations when building a test automation architecture.

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When discussing test automation, people often prioritise quantity over quality. This implies creating more test cases regardless of the quality of the test automation scripts. While the test coverage is one of the critical testing factors, we need to think about quality first. After ensuring quality, we can focus on increasing the number of test cases to attain the desired coverage.

In the realm of test automation, quality starts with the architecture. This is the key part that would decide whether a test automation project is successful or not. A well designed architecture can lead us to achieve better results, more reliability, and confidence with the usage within quality assurance along with the test coverage. The architecture should define a high level of abstraction by defining reusable components and modules that can be used in multiple test cases. This method can enhance the maintainability, flexibility, and extensibility of the test automation framework. Overall, abstraction is a powerful technique that can help us to simplify complex systems and improve the maintainability and flexibility of the test automation architecture. By abstracting test cases, data, system, and framework components, we can create a modular and reusable test automation architecture that is easier to modify, extend, and maintain. Therefore, our test automation architecture would support quality attributes like the following ones:

Maintainability: This is one of the greatest concerns in test automation projects. Sometimes, there is great automation with great performance and coverage, but when a change is needed, the cost is higher than implementing a new feature, which leads the automation project to fail. Maintenance of the automation tests should not consume a significant part of the test effort, ensuring the tests remain effective in the long term.

Performance: Even if the automation is intended to be executed without human intervention, execution time is an important consideration to take into account. We should use as many machine resources as we can and leave aside other threads that can affect the performance. There are three common mechanisms to consider in order to assure that behaviour:

• • Hard-coded waits: This is not recommended as it is directly a waste of the machine’s resources. This can be the root cause of many test automation problems and instability.

• • Dynamic wait by polling: This mechanism is acceptable but it is still a waste of resources  as we are dynamically waiting for some state or action to happen and we could use these resources to run other tests.

• • Subscribe to the event mechanism of the SUT (System Under Test): This is the most recommended and flexible way as it is much more reliable than the two previous options. However, the test scripting language needs to be subscribed to the SUT event and it needs to offer these events to the test application. 

In any case, the most used mechanism nowadays is the dynamic wait.

Learnability: The use of consistent and standard terminology throughout the whole project can help users understand quickly and easily along with concise, clear, and up-to-date documentation that helps the test automation engineers to know how the system is structured, how to modify it, and how to troubleshoot issues. Additionally, designing a simple system while still fulfilling the requirements is the key to learnability.

Modularity: A Test Automation Architecture should be used with as much abstraction as possible, since this enables flexibility regarding further evolution or transition to new approaches or technologies. A good modular design fitting the SUT allows a high degree of reusability of individual components and thus reduces the number of artefacts  that need to be adapted when changes are necessary, which also improves maintainability.

Reusability: A reusable system can save time and effort in developing new test cases and maintaining the existing ones. A modular architecture is not only beneficial for maintainability but also for reusability. The main points are:

• • Including the abstraction at the architecture level to take it to the framework level

• • Having test case libraries for easy reuse

• • Defining parameters for test cases so they can be easily modified and reused, which leads us to reduce the amount of duplicated code and make it easier to create and maintain the test cases.

Reliability: Automation tests should be designed to be reliable, which means, they should be able to run consistently and the duration should be similar between each execution. This can be achieved through robust error handling, fault tolerance, and the use of reliable tools.

Scalability: The test automation architecture should be designed to be scalable. This means the tests can be easily modified in size or scale. This can be achieved through a flexible architecture, the use of reusable components, and the ability to handle large amounts of data.

Interoperability: The architecture should be able to work with other tools and systems. This can be achieved through the use of open standards and APIs, as well as effective integration with other operating systems.