General

AludraTest is an extensible framework for automating functional and integration tests of web applications and other technologies.

The framework unites the methodologies, capabilities and best practices of

• junit,
• selenium / webdriver,
• data driven testing,
• key word / action word testing,
• hybrid testing,
• strong refactoring and
• continuous delivery.

Origin and history

AludraTest has been build for automated, continuous testing of an in-house developed web application with many different interfaces for an logistics company. Though we had to

• integrate different technologies
  • web application including AJAX,
  • messaging (JMS)
  • file (ftp, sftp, http, nfs)
  • different content formats: XML, EDI, EDIfact, CSV, TSV, custom flat file
• cope with refactoring of an iterative development approach
• cope with development of two to three parallel release branches

The market and Requirements

There are many commercial as well open-source testing tools and frameworks in the market.

Commercial Tools

Commercial solutions usually have a strong focus on manual testing, test management and reporting. Test automation may be an additional component or even be integrated and often focus on capture-replay. Some tools have some refactoring capabilities. Some tools provide adapters to several technologies for automation.

On the down side they usually bring their own editors and do not treat test automation as software development. In consequence, these tools have limited support for wide spread continuous delivery solution, source code management, refactoring support, branching and merging.

Often you can get very fast and good results but maintenance can be challenging depending on your development model for the main application.

Open Source Tools

The open-source tools usually focus on exactly one aspect, like the famous junit does on unit testing of single classes or a bunch of classes and provides a framework to automate any kind of algorithm.

Selenium does a very good job to remote control a huge amount of web browser - operating system combinations, but does not provide any framework for writing tests.

Both have no superior GUI tool and tread test automation as software development. Though all tools for software development like eclipse EDI, git, svn, jenkins/hudson etc. can be applied.

Requirements

AludraTest shall fill the major gaps between commercial and open-source tools by applying methods and tools for software development and build up an integrated tool chain.

Main requirements are listed below. For detailed requirements, please refer to GitHub issues marked as 'feature' and documentation of single services and components.