Dietmar Strasser talked at Star West 2010 about incorporating State into Keyword-driven automation UI tools to limit the amount of keywords presented and reducing use of keywords at the wrong time. It seemed to drift from product demo to cool idea show-and-tell but ended up not really being either as it is just an internal tool they are playing with. My notes are really tool specific and not really relevant to the general audience. A cool experiment, but there are way too many layers I think and can see creating / maintaining within this system being a huge task. His internal usage says otherwise, but then again, he wrote the tool. How many times have I fallen into that trap?

  • Keyword growth is a problem.
  • State-driven Testing = Keyword-driven Testing + (UI) State Management
  • The tool has an XML based DSL to model the state
  • That XML is parsed to control the state stack
  • Who does what?
    • DSL – tester, domain specialist
    • Test Design – tester, domain specialist, product owner
    • Implementation (Java only right now) – developer, automation engineer