Best Practices for Developing a Test Automation Framework
Before we jump into the best practices, let’s discuss why you need to follow best practices in your framework.
Why
In summary;
Best practices are important because they ensure reliable, stable tests that catch bugs early and reduce flaky results. They improve maintainability, making updating and scaling the test suite easier as the application grows. Best practices also promote code readability and collaboration, allowing teams to work efficiently, and ensure that tests are reusable and modular. They enhance test performance, make execution faster, and help integrate tests smoothly into CI/CD pipelines. In the long run, they reduce costs, improve cross-browser compatibility, and lead to cleaner code that’s easier to maintain and debug.
Test Automation Frameworks
I divided framework development best practices into two categories—one for UI and the other for API.
Some practices can be overlapped. However, we must follow different best practices in each framework development. In order to simplify things I decided to add two different articles instead of one.
Eg: In the GUI test automation framework we need to follow Page Object Model (POM) design. However, when you are developing an API-only framework this is not applicable at all.
If you are developing an API-only framework then you don’t need to validate response codes like we do in API testing.
UI Automation Frameworks
API Automation Frameworks
Java naming conventions
Whichever framework that you use you need to follow the standard naming conventions. Check the following article dedicated to Automation Engineers.
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