Investigating the use of DSLs for structure agnostic web test automation

Abstract

Business-to-Consumer (B2C) e-commerce systems are common place and most companies launch their own online stores with the hope of reaching a wider spectrum of customers. The impact of such systems on a company's income emphasises the need for ensuring a high level of technical quality. With an industry-wide shift to automated test execution justified by regular and ongoing changes to such systems, most companies invest considerably in setting up and maintaining test automation frameworks. The process of web automated testing requires specialised skills in the use of the tools required for conducting test operations, as well as the required format of how tests are structured. Another issue is that the structure of a website varies across different e-commerce websites, so tests created for a website would be specific to that website only. This link to the underlying structure of a website and the knowledge required for performing these tests are time consuming. So if a domain specific language could be developed to express tests on B2C e-commerce websites, this layer of abstraction may be able to help reduce these issues. In order to determine the validity of this approach, I designed a DSL for expressing tests for B2C systems, and developed a prototype which compiles the DSL to generate automated web tests. The outcome was that the use of domain specific languages is shown to provide a probable solution to making test writing easier. A layer of abstraction over the underlying structure of websites and web testing tools achieves a universal tool which can be used on any website irrespective of the implementation. The use of the DSL approach for writing automated web tests presents a simplified solution to writing structure independent tests on websites, since elements can be determined automatically. Although code generation is automated, due to the extensibility of the prototype, the components of the system can be interchanged as required.