Upcoming Project : Python Web Testing Framework

It's been a while since I written a post, in fact I switched jobs twice since the last time I wrote.  While my last job was mainly focused on getting manual testing process up to speed, which didn't allow me to do as much in test automation.  Now that I've changed jobs to a company that has a good amount of continuous integration in place and a more stable product, I can go back to focusing on the more automated side of things.

One of the cool things I get to work on, which I'm very excited about, is creating an Acceptance Testing Framework (ATF) to better organize and manage our automated end to end tests.  I'll be building one using using various open source pieces.  I already have many ideas I'm very excited about.  As I implement the various pieces, I'll write some short articles explaining the philosophy and the technical high level design of the pieces I'm implementing as I implement them.

Some of the items I'm thinking of currently (things may change as I start to design and implement the framework):

• Layered framework approach using Python (for purpose of matching our dev language)
• Using Selenium Page Objects - http://pragprog.com/magazines/2010-08/page-objects-in-python
• Getting tests to run over any browser on the cloud using SauceLabs - https://saucelabs.com/resources
• Aligning the top level driver to match up with our Scrum process using Behavior Driven Development (BDD) - https://github.com/rlisagor/freshen
• Implementing some custom reporting by making small mods to the HTMLTestRunner Reports - http://tungwaiyip.info/software/HTMLTestRunner.html
• Implementing a Data Definition Language (DDL) for specifying complex Test Data using lexers - http://www.evanfosmark.com/2009/02/sexy-lexing-with-python/
• Creating configurable tests using YAML - http://pyyaml.org/wiki/PyYAMLDocumentation

I'll have more info to come in the future.  I'm still in the conception and planning stages.  Please send me any feedback with any ideas you may have.