Test Automation - Data Driven Test

You need more data for testing. I would rather re-phrase this to state you need more varieties of data rather than more data itself. Each data set must help the tester to drive the application thru a different logic or path, so that we can do better testing. Take the example of booking airline ticket. It is just 1 screen that takes data and users feed these fields to get their ticket booked. Each ticket may be a different combination. A human tester gets bored when repeatedly seeing and operating on the same screen. But this has to be done any way. 

Here comes the data driven test (DDT) feature of the test automation tools. Test steps are same, but data is different, for each transaction I must use a different data set - If this is your case, use data driven test. Every testing tool comes up with a data sheet or data pool. Here you need to provide data in a spreadsheet like file. For booking a ticket you need from place, to place, one way or round trip, date of journey, return date, number of persons etc. Though there are lot more details for ticket booking, let us limit to these data at this point. 

The first thing for DDT is to create a file that has these data. Usually you can use a csv file or xls file. The first line is usually the title for the data. See the example below.


FROM-PLACE,TO-PLACE,TRIP-TYPE,JOURNEYDT,RETURNDT,NUMPERSONS
Los Angeles,New York,TWOWAY,10-JUN-2013,14-JUN-2013,2

Los Angeles,Denver,ONEWAY,10-JUN-2013,10-JUN-2013,1

Los Angeles,London,TWOWAY,10-JUN-2013,18-AUG-2013,5
...

We need to prepare each line of data that represent some equivalent partition set to test our application. 

Once data is created, we need to record a script using the tool, that does one ticket booking, by entering the data in the above fields. While recording we will give some data and that will reflect in the script. e.g.

BookingScreen.Clear
BookingScreen.FromAirPort.Set "Los Angeles"
BookingScreen.ToAirPort.Set "Denver"
BookingScreen.TripType.Select "TwoWay"
BookingScreen.DateOfJourney.Set "10-May-2013"
BookingScreen.DateOfReturn.Set "12-May-2013"
BookingScreen.NumberOfPersons.Set 1
BookingScreen.Submit

The syntax given above is generic and not specific to any tool. To ensure that the script uses the data from our file, we may have to modify the script manually or use the data driver wizard of the tool. We need to set the value for each UI field data entry, to point to a column in the data sheet. Also, we must loop thru all rows in the data sheet, so that the script executes for all records and books multiple tickets. It may  look like the following.

DataSheet = "C:\\mydata.csv"

For currRow = 1 to DataSheet.RowCount

   DataSheet.CurrentRow = currRow
   BookingScreen.Clear
   BookingScreen.FromAirPort.Set DataSheet.getColumnvalue("FROM-PLACE")
   BookingScreen.ToAirPort.Set DataSheet.getColumnvalue("TO-PLACE")
   BookingScreen.TripType.Select DataSheet.getColumnvalue("TRIP-TYPE")
   BookingScreen.DateOfJourney.Set DataSheet.getColumnvalue("JOURNEYDT")
   BookingScreen.DateOfReturn.Set DataSheet.getColumnvalue("RETURNDT")
   BookingScreen.NumberOfPersons.SetDataSheet.getColumnvalue("NUMPERSONS")
   BookingScreen.Submit
Next

The simple code, will get all records from the csv file and repeat feeding the screen with different data sets from the csv file. This way, a 10 line code can enter 10000 records with little human interference.