Cloud Testing: Enhancing the speed of Test Automation using Cucumber Framework

In the current trend of Cloud Computing world, most of the companies are showing interest on developing open source projects that ultimately targets wide variety of browsers device users ranging from IE on Windows, Safari on Mac, Microsoft Edge on Windows 10, Firefox and chrome on all supported devices and operating systems. Before releasing the product into market, the company has to focus on testing of the product as it plays an important phase in Software Development Life Cycle to ensure the software product is free from defects by covering various types of testings that include functional, regression and cross browser compatibility. To initiate this testing phase and make the software as cloud enabled application huge investment is required in terms of hardware infrastructure to compensate the testing coverage on various browser platforms. To overcome this financial costs for companies, a cloud-hosted testing platform tools like sauce labs and BrowserStack is introduced in the market to speed up the automated testing of developed application. From the sources on the internet it is disclosed that currently 800 browser instances of beta versions with different O/S combinations are instantly available on the cloud-hosted testing platforms that eventually eases the hassle of infrastructure management for testing the applications. To use this infrastructure a reusable test automation framework is necessary for the testers to the run the tests automatically on different browsers. In the existing frameworks like keyword-driven and hybrid framework, tester need to have coding knowledge in order to adapt them. So the main intention of this research is to propose a re-usable automation framework where a non-technical tester can run the tests on the cloud hosted testing platform just by enabling the changes in feature files of cucumber. Furthermore, it is important to evaluate the amount of execution time taken by the tests on different browsers along with the memory consumption during each test run as this statistics will help us in identifying the proposed test automation framework will speedup the execution tests