SysNat Layers
What should and can a ATDD/BDD/DDD-Tool be able of? The experience of SysNat's author is based on three long term projects that revealed the same findings. There are six important aspects which a good tool (such as SysNat hopefully is) supports:
- Import of test data from data files (sometimes provided by a different department or team and sometimes changing frequently)
- Formulation of test execution in natural language with a minimum of restrictions
- Translation of natural language into programm code and its execution during test runs
- Communication with the application under tests (thereby collecting information about it)
- Generation of a Domain User Valuable Test Report (which is much more than repeating the formulation of the test execution)
- Means to backup or archive the test results
Whereas most BDD tools (e.g. Cucumber) only cover aspect two and three, SysNat covers all of them. Those aspects can be regarded as software layers:
The illustration above shows that the communication with the application under test is not necessarily restricted to UI test, so that backend tests and service tests and even database tests are possible. However, those deeper level communication must be implemented in the communication layer. Currently, only for the high level UI communication a predefined implementation for web applications exists in SysNat. However, introducing a second implementation of the GuiController interface (next to existing SeleniumGuiControl) is not a big deal if you know how to contol you application under test. The same is true for backend communication e.g. REST calls of services or database connections.