Data driven web application testing
Data driven web application testing is an important aspect for the test automation of web applications. For this type of testing a test case is being repeated with different input and reference values. There are no restrictions how to use this data during web application testing with web2test.
Data driven web application testing is often used to compare the input value of an event with the expected value in the check node. web2test offers different possibilities to store data or to load data from external sources. The easiest way is using a data driver node which sets up an environment for iterating over the sets of data, as well as one or more data binder nodes which supply the variables.
figure 1: Screenshot of a data table in web2test for a login
Note that there is no data binder in the actual sense. It serves as a general term for the different types of data drivers which can be used for data driven web application testing. The following forms are supported:
- data driven web application testing using a data table
- data driven web application testing using an Excel data file
- data driven web application testing using a CSV data file
- and data driven web application testing using a Database
Besides the login in figure 1 one could for example, when employing a cross browser test tool (see also Cross browser web based application testing), also use data driven web application testing to define the browsers in which the application should be tested within the test suite (see figure 2). The testing in different browsers is called compatibility testing and is another important part of web testing.
figure 2: Screenshot of a data table for testing in different browsers
Furthermore web2test offers an extension API for the access to arbitrary external data during web application testing. Each column of a table represents one variable whose name is specified in the column header. Each row is a set of data with one value per variable. Therefore, when performing data driven web application testing with web2test, the number of rows determines the number of iterations of the data-driven loop. To use respective data one has to first define variables by adding columns. Afterwards different values can be added using the rows.
web2test offers versatile fields of application and a high customizability. Thanks to the Capture & Replay approach (see Testing web applications with Capture & Replay) the effort needed for automated data driven testing can hence be reduced considerably compared to the manual procedure and that almost without programmming.
The “Data driven web application testing” article in German:
