Manual | Tutorial | Standard Library | Release Notes

Manual

Version 4.2.5

23.1

Introduction

The concept of keyword-driven testing allows business analysts and testers to describe test-cases without any deep QF-Test knowledge. Those test-cases can either be described in a meta-language or directly in a testmanagement system. QF-Test will then read and execute those test-cases. The implementation of the underlying test-steps inside QF-Test needs to be done by engineers having QF-Test knowledge.

Business testers and QF-Test engineers are free in defining the way how to describe test-steps. They can define a wide range of keywords like simple action-related keywords (e.g. click a button) or more complex business-related keywords (e.g. create an object inside the SUT). Combining test-steps into a test-case could be achieved by a strict table-oriented approach like clickButton=OK or formulating the test-steps in continuous text like "Close the dialog via click on ok".

The following examples illustrate the most popular variants of defining test-cases in a keyword-driven manner. The demo test-case will create a vehicle in the CarConfigurator demo application of QF-Test.

Option 1: Business-related test-steps (see subsection 23.2.1). You find a sample at qftest-4.2.5/demo/keywords/simple_business.

Test-step
Launch SUT, if necessary
Open vehicles dialog via Options -> Vehicles
Enter data (name and price)
Press new in order to create the vehicle
Press OK in order to close the dialog
Check creation of vehicle in table

Table 23.1: Test-case using business-related keywords

Option 2: Atomic test-steps (see subsection 23.2.2). You find a sample at qftest-4.2.5/demo/keywords/simple_atomic.

Test-step
Launch SUT, if necessary
Select menu 'Options'
Select menu 'Vehicles...'
Fill text-field 'Name'
Fill text-field 'Price'
Press button 'New' in order to create the vehicle
Press button 'OK' in order to close the dialog
Check table, whether new created vehicle appears

Table 23.2: Test-case using atomic keywords

Option 3: Behavior-Driven Testing (BDT) from a technical perspective (see subsection 23.4.1). You find a sample at qftest-4.2.5/demo/keywords/behaviordriven.

Test-step
Given SUT is running
Given vehicles dialog is opened
When vehicle name is set to <name>
And vehicle price is set to <price>
And button new clicked
And button ok clicked
Then row with <name> and <formatted-price> appears in table
And column model has value <name>
And column price has value <formatted-price>

Table 23.3: Test-case with Behavior-Driven Testing from a technical perspective

Option 4: Behavior-Driven Testing (BDT) with business keywords (see subsection 23.4.2). You find a sample at qftest-4.2.5/demo/keywords/behaviordriven_business.

Test-step
Given application is ready to enter vehicle data
When vehicle created with <model> and <price>
Then <model> with <formatted price> appears in table

Table 23.4: Test-case with Behavior-Driven Testing from a business perspective

In the subsequent sections you will find a more detailed description of those variants of keyword-driven testing with QF-Test. The concept of Behavior-driven testing (BDT) is described in section 23.4. From a perspective of QF-Test BDT is just a special variation of keyword-driven testing.

All samples use the CarConfigurator of QF-Test which is also provided by the installation. You can find all samples in the folder qftest-4.2.5/demo/keywords/. In order to show the test planning aspects we provide Excel files containing the required test-steps. Of course you can also go ahead and use your testmanagement tool to plan test-steps. We are using Excel files as Excel is a very common piece of software and reading Excel file is quite simple in QF-Test.

The section keywords with dynamic components (see section 23.3) describes how to use QF-Test just as test-executor without really recording steps within QF-Test. You need to interact with QF-Test only in rare cases when applying this scenario.

Please take care to copy all test-suites to a project-related folder first and modify them there.