Project Background: This is regarding an ERP system of a manufacturing organization. It comprises many modules including manufacturing, finance, inventory, purchasing, sales and human resources. It was their product and it was sold to different clients with the customizations. The ERP system was implemented with regular updates and new feature implementations according to their client's customizations. Therefore, executing the regression cycles should be required by ensuring these implementations are ready for the needed clients as soon as possible. That's how they required test automation. To address their requirement effectively, the Test team had to build a test automation framework to reduce script maintenance costs and provide long-term scalability for their ERP testing processes.
Strategy: To tackle the challenges, the team designed a comprehensive test automation framework tailored to ERP systems' unique needs. The framework emphasized modularity, scalability, and maintainability, ensuring minimal manual effort for future updates.
In this article, we discuss building a modular Test Automation Framework for ERP System and we hope to bring the other best practices from our next articles.
Modular Framework Design:
Key features of a Modular Framework
1. Test case design by modular-wise categorization
A modular test automation framework built with categorized test cases for each module (Finance, Stock, Sales, etc...) of the ERP system. In an ERP system, each module should be considered as a separate entity. So, the test scripts were grouped according to the particular module's functionality.
Example:
Finance Module: Test scripts for invoice generation, payment processing, and budgeting, etc...
Inventory Module: Test scripts for stock level updates, inventory adjustments, and stock audits, etc...
Sales Module: Test scripts for order placements, sales reports, and customer discounts, etc...
The directory structure needs to be organized based on the ERP modules.
AutomationFramework
── Finance
── Inventory
── Purchasing
── Sales
── HR
This segregation and logical structure helps separate and handle the impact by making test maintenance manageable if there are modular-specific changes. Maintaining independent test cases for each module helps to isolate and debug failures easily. Because failure of the test script of one module is not a cause for the failure of the test script in another module.
For example: If the Sales module scripts fail, other modules like Finance and Stock remain unaffected.
The other thing is this modular framework supports scalability. If there are new modules or functionalities, those can be taken to this module structure easily.
2. Reusability
There can be common functionalities such as login, certain forms, and navigations. These shared functions can be taken into reusable methods. By using reusable components for shared functionalities, duplication across test scripts can be reduced.
Abstracting these functionalities into a shared functionality library ensures code reusability, improves maintainability, and reduces redundancy.
A shared functionality library is a central repository of methods or functions that can be reused across test cases for different modules. These methods encapsulate common tasks that are not specific to any single test case but are essential for executing tests.
For simple example: Login Functionality
ERP systems often require users to log in before accessing modules like Finance, Inventory, or Sales. Instead of duplicating the login logic in every test case, the process can be abstracted into a reusable login() method.
As an advantage, this single method can be referred to in relevant test scripts without coding the same logic in the test script. It increases the code reusability. If anything needs to be changed in the login feature, it is enough to make the changes to the login method.
It improves scalability as adding new modules or test cases becomes easier because shared components handle common tasks.
3. Parameterization with dynamic inputs
With parameterization, test cases can be handled with dynamic inputs. It allows a single test script to cover multiple scenarios. It really helps in conducting comprehensive testing as many test combinations are involved in each module. With parameterization, these different combinations of inputs can be handled without duplicating the scripts. The unavailability of duplicated scripts helps reduce maintenance efforts and enhance efficiency.
For example,
Testing of payment processing in the finance module needs to be done with different conditions such as different payment methods with/without Tax and with/without discounts, etc...
Once these dynamic data are stored in an external data source like Excel or JSON file and once the test script is parameterized accordingly, that single script can be executed for these multiple test combinations
This brings many benefits for the maintenance. If the team needs to add more combinations, they can add to the source file without making amendments to the script. The ability to handle various test scenarios via a single script fast the test execution.
Challenges and Solutions:
Lack of domain knowledge for Automation Engineers - Understanding the business logic and workflows of ERP modules like Finance, Inventory, and Sales is essential for creating accurate test cases and reusable components. Even though the manual test engineers are domain experts, the domain knowledge of automation engineers was less than them. As a solution these functional specialists were allocated with them to give the domain knowledge and Automation test engineers collaborated with them when working on framework design.
Dependency Management - Shared components are reused across multiple test cases. A change in one component can unintentionally break other tests. As the solution, the team maintained versioning for shared components and test changes. As there was a regression test suite, it helped quickly identify issues caused by changes to shared components.
Maintenance Overhead- When there are frequent updates, it requires continuous updates to the shared components. If those components affect multiple test cases, updating the shared components will be a time-consuming task. As the solution, the team used dynamic locators in test scripts to handle UI changes with minimal updates. However, the team had to think about performance bottlenecks as well. Apart from that, getting the support of the development team to work on the maintenance part was another good solution because they knew about the code changes they did. As that awareness does not come to us directly, that solution minimizes the maintenance effort.
Conclusion: A modular test automation framework provides substantial benefits but comes with challenges that require strategic planning and execution. By addressing these challenges with the proposed solutions, teams can build a scalable, efficient, and maintainable framework that significantly reduces testing costs and improves the overall quality of ERP systems.
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