Using Data to Control Test Flow

In day-to-day automation tasks, Test Engineers have to think of different ways to write their automation tests. At the same time, while creating test automation strategies they have to think about the best way to use the existing code, and also provide new lines of code for new coverage. DRY code comes in handy when designing automation tests.

Let’s say that you’re starting the automation of your project, and you’re working on the web application. When testing web applications, usually there are forms that need to be automated by inserting data into inputs. But, in most cases, those forms are made of optional and required fields (inputs). So, those tests would usually have different flows throughout the application.

(Source) 

Presenting the problem

In order to automate these fields, Test Engineers would probably use simple if/else logic to control test flow.

There are two problems with this approach:

• Complexity
• Maintainability

Imagine automating a form with a large number of inputs where, by inserting data to one input, a whole subset of inputs is open and this flow keeps repeating throughout the form.

You would probably agree that there are a lot of combinations to be covered from the automation perspective.

Another problem that might occur for a test written with a lot of conditioning is maintainability. How fast can you make a change in your test?
For example, what happens if an optional field becomes a required one, you would have to track down and change methods in two places at least (in conditionals). But if your methods are scaled in many different tests, that would take a lot of time to track and change, and also, it might lead to an accidental error (or changing the test flow), leading to more time consumption.

From these examples, we can agree that using conditional logic isn’t always the best way to control your test flow. So, is there a better way?

Well, keep reading this blog, and I will show you a better way.

Presenting the solution

Let’s show a simple demo (GitHub). For this purpose, we will create a test with an example from an automation practice website. Our tech stack consists of Protractor, Jasmine & Selenium WebDriver, and for the test structure, we will be using Page Object Model (POM). POM means that our tests and data are separated from web elements and their locators, so that when you have to change an element locator, it’s changed only in one place, and it doesn’t affect tests. Every application screen represents a separate page object. The same philosophy applies to the data file, if data is changed in a data file, that change reflects on all tests where the data is used.

In addition to this structure is the “Tasks” folder, which contains tasks (code partitions that are formed from page objects), and they execute a certain job. The structure shown in the image means that the tests are made of tasks, and the tasks are made of page objects.

The Registration Test suite would look like this:

const data = require('../Data/data.js'),
   requiredData = data.requiredData,
   CompleteRegistration = require('../Tasks/CompleteRegistration.js'),
   NavigateToAuthPage = require('../Tasks/NavigateToAuthPage');
 
const completeRegistration = new CompleteRegistration(),
   navigateToAuthPage = new NavigateToAuthPage();
 
browser.waitForAngularEnabled(false); //For non-Angular apps
browser.ignoreSynchronization = true; //For non-Angular apps
browser.manage().window().maximize(); //Browser opens in maximized screen
 
describe('001: Registration', () => {
 
   let additionalData = {
       company: "Amazon",
       address2: "10th Street",
       email: `[email protected]`,
       address: "9th street in the East Village"
   }
 
   let allData = Object.assign(requiredData, additionalData);
 
   beforeEach( () => {
       navigateToAuthPage.navigateToAuthPage(requiredData.pageURL);
   })
 
   it('001: Complete registration form (required data)', async () => {
       await completeRegistration.completeRegistrationForm(requiredData);
   });
 
   it('002: Complete registration form (all data)', async () => {
      await completeRegistration.completeRegistrationForm(allData);
   });
});

The NavigateToAuthPage task would be:

class NavigateToAuthPage{
 
   async navigateToAuthPage(pageUrl){
       console.log('Started navigating to auth page ...')
      
       homePage.openPageURL(pageUrl)
           .waitForHomePage()
           .clickOnSignIn();
 
       authForm.waitForAuthTitle();
   }
}
module.exports = NavigateToAuthPage;

The Complete Registration task would be:

class CompleteRegistration{
 
   async completeRegistrationForm(data){
       console.log('Started creating registration ...')
      
       authForm.insertValueInEmail(data.email)
           .createAccount();
      
       registrationForm.waitForCreateAccount()
           .insertFirstName(data.firstName)
           .insertLastName(data.lastName)
           .insertInIfDefined(data.company, () => {
               registrationForm.insertCompany(data.company);
           })
           .inserFirstAddress(data.address)
           .insertInIfDefined(data.address2, () => {
               registrationForm.insertSecondAddress(data.address2)
           })
           .insertCity(data.city)
   }
}
module.exports = CompleteRegistration;