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Differences with Robot Framework

April 18th, 2017

How is Test Case Central different than Robot Framework?.

A prospective customer recently asked how Test Case Central compares to Robot Framework. Robot Framework is an excellent open source framework which allows you to abstract out the test actions so they may be later assembled into tests by less technical QA members. Unfortunately, the up front work of abstracting out the test actions typically requires programming and many QA Analysts are not programmers. Test Case Central takes a fundamentally different approach using AI to generate these test actions and then automatically generating test plans using this information. This two step process permits the user to override any assumptions made by the framework's AI before the test plans are generated. If all the assumptions are correct the user simply presses a button to generate the test plan which Test Case Central then automatically generates.

This makes the entire QA process more accessible to non technical QA staff while also providing significantly larger test coverage than is normally achieved when a user must manually generate every test in a test plan. It is not uncommon for Test Case Central test plans to include thousands of individual tests.

Where Test Case Central and Robot Framework do resemble each other is when the user wishes to exert more control over the source of test data used during the testing process. In both cases, the user must provide custom code which in the case of Test Case Central is abstracted out as Custom Getters expressed in the python programming language. While Custom Getters may be complex methods, in most cases they are simply 2-3 lines of python code (pull next item from a data store or generate the next value based on a simple array, etc.).

Finally, like most open source testing frameworks, using Robot Framework, it is the user's responsibility to crate meaningful reports while Test Case Central provides many QA oriented standard reports like Run Analysis and Step Results out of the box with no programming required.

Ken