Improving test data management in record and playback testing tools

Abstract

It is almost impossible to prevent requirement change in the web development life cycle. Selenium despite being a widely used open source automated tool for testing web application, has its limitation when it concerns test data management. Frequent changes in requirement result in changes in the user interface which in turn requires additional effort to re-record the test script. Eventually keeping track of test data used for each test script becomes very problematic for the tester. In this paper, we analyse existing tools and provide a design of an automated testing tool, Kishanium that also manages the set of test data. A prototype was created during experimentation phase to prove the concept of the underlying ideas of the proposed tool. The prototype has been implemented based on the core technologies of DomDocument, XPath and Curl. The testing carried out proves that Kishanium is a useful automated tool that can be used on its own or in conjunction with Selenium. With a very systematic approach it automatically searches input and button objects, allows testers to add new test data, edit existing test data and delete previous test data in order to respond to frequent requirement changes. The power of Kishanium is that it is able to re-use existing test data even if there are a number of changes in the user interface. It also automatically runs the tests with the appropriate set of test data using its Poster Component. Moreover the Kishanium automated tool provides additional features such as Data generator, Spylink and Snapshot.