Lesson #7: Creating data-driven tests

Demonstrates how to enhance your tests with external test data to better simulate real-world user actions. Audience: Testers, Automation engineers

Time: Duration: 2 hours

Prerequisites:

• Basic understanding of the TestArchitect user interface
• Familiarity with the TestArchitect test editor
• Essential understanding of TestArchitect repositories, projects, and tests

What you will learn:

• Creating data sets
• Incorporating data sets into your test
• Reading data from external files
• Filtering incoming data

Data-driven testing overview
With data-driven testing, a test sequence is executed repeatedly using values from a data source. For each test cycle, a different row of data is applied.

Data-driven tests
Automated test sequences can be run repeatedly using sets of data supplied from a repository source external to the test.

Creating a data set
Data sets are sources of simulated real-world user data, and expected outcomes, for TestArchitect tests.

Creating a data-driven test
Write a test that relies on an external data source (a data set, in this case) to simulate real-world user input.

Running the test
Execute a test with multiple data records (rows) supplied by a data set.

External data sources
In addition to data sets, text files residing outside of the TestArchitect repository may also be used to supply data to tests.

Creating an external data source
Create a tab-delimited text file to supply data sets to your test.

Creating a dummy data set
To connect a test to an external data source, you must create a dummy data set to provide a crucial link to the file.

Accessing external data from the test
Setting up a data-driven test to accept data from an external text file.

Running the test
Execute a test with multiple records (rows) of data supplied by an external data file.

Using filters
You can apply filters to your data set to limit the sets of data applied to your test.

Applying a data filter
Add a filter to your test to limit the data coming in.

Named filters
Named filters are established in a data set and may be referenced in your tests.

Summary: What you learned