Initially developed by Carl Nagle for SAS Institute
Evolves as Opensource with permission from SAS Institute
Visit our Software Automation Framwork Support SAFSDEV project on SourceForge.
Our focus is on implementing tools and frameworks for strategic, long-term success in functional test automation. To that end we work on "keyword-driven" engines, also sometimes called "data-driven" engines. What we are dealing with, actually, are tools and full implementations of testing frameworks for "action-based testing" or "the action word approach" for functional test automation. Read more about the benefits of keyword-driven testing in the Test Automation Frameworks whitepaper.
Larger portions of our tools development are intended to benefit functional test automation in general. This is an effort to provide functionality and tools that augment, or can be used independent of, the commercial automation solutions used by many automators. These tools are not only suitable for the keyword-driven engines that are the focal point of our effort, but they are also useful for any number of other software test automation projects.
We have dubbed the "general-purpose" nature of our work, Software Automation Framework Support, or SAFS.
We take these general-purpose tools and apply them to specific keyword-driven engine implementations we call, SAFS Engines. Our primary goal is to implement a common keyword-driven engine design across multiple tools and testing platforms for robust automation that can be immune to the course of any one particular testing tool. This helps us realize the concept:
This strategy allows us to separate our tests from the automation tools that will execute them. So, we can actually migrate tests from one automation tool to another, or even use multiple automation tools simultaneously. For example, we could use IBM Rational Robot, Selenium, and IBM Rational Functional Tester at the same time to accomplish our goals. We could also have IBM Rational Robot execute the test on Windows, but use Selenium to run the same test on Unix.
RRAFS (Rational Robot Automation Framework Support), our most mature framework, has been around since 1999.
We want to acknowledge and present kudos to STAF; another SourceForge project that has enabled us to develop many of our tool-independent pieces with minimal effort. This is a wonderful project to investigate for ANY kind of test automation framework you might be considering or developing.
Thanks for visiting! If you'd like to find out more, drop in on our discussion forums.
The SAFSDEV Users and Developers