Software Test Automation with Robot Framework

Automated testing allows for releases to be quickly verified and regression tested multiple times over a product’s development period, providing a level of quality assurance unmatched by a purely manual process. This article discusses the driving objectives, implementation strategy, and general overview of a test automation framework created using the open source project Robot Framework as its test automation core. The framework described in this article has been used to provide test automation capabilities to both Graphical User Interface (GUI) based Windows applications and embedded systems. In addition to an overview of the developed framework, this article also provides the results of automated testing for multiple releases and a discussion of selected lessons learned from its creation and maintenance. General Terms Automated Testing, Software Testing, Test Automation, Test Engineering.