An Automation Tool Converting Test Steps into Keywords for Automated Test Development

Robot Framework is an extensible, keyword-driven, and Python-based test automation framework that is widely used for end-to-end acceptance testing or acceptance-driven test development (ATDD). The simplicity of its syntax also contributes to its excellent readability, making the naming of each keyword in test scripts particularly important. The name of a keyword should accurately describe its function, as it affects the time that code reviewers spend to understand its purpose or even the entire test case. Selecting a suitable name for keywords often requires a considerable amount of time. Therefore, a fixed naming format is a method to shorten this process. With a set of fixed naming rules, the structure of previously named similar actions' keywords can be directly copied to the current keyword being named. Additionally, a fixed naming format can significantly reduce the time spent searching for reused keywords. In addition to the aforementioned advantages, this study points out that the fixed naming format can also be used to directly convert test steps into corresponding action keywords during the test case design phase and proposes an effective automation tool to convert test steps into keywords for enhancing the value of test steps and saving test case development time. In situations where the test steps are well-structured, the conversion tool can accelerate test case development speed by extracting the action keywords of each test step and converting them into corresponding keywords.