What is meant by data driven automation?

Test automation is perhaps one of the best testing methodologies and this testing methodology is exploited usually by one of the either ways as mentioned below:

1. Code driven testing and

2. Graphical user interface testing

In this article we are going to discuss about the data driven automation. Data driven automation is a self justifying term. You can easily make out that data driven automation is one in which the data is obtained from the external files.

About Data Driven Automation

Now what is that which makes it so special with the testers? 

-  In this type of automation, you can easily change the input data without going down.

-  Data driven automation in a way regulates easy maintenance of the scripts.

- Data driven automation is all about how the software system or application performs with multiple sets of the input data. 

- While carrying out data driven automation, it is necessary that you link the data to the test scripts with which the concerned data is being driven. 

- This whole process of linking the data to the test scripts is called “parameterization of the tests”. 

- The data to be fed as input is recorded in a data table. 

- This operation can be done either manually or it can also be automated by using some data driver wizard. 

- Data driven automation is like picking up data from a data table (which has been parameterized) or query data base and writing down these parameters in some other file so that the software can track it back. 

- As we approach a complex functionality whose testing requires more test cases, the work becomes quite laborious as the testing becomes more and more complicated. 

- For multiple sets of test cases as well as data you can execute one common test in order to figure out which data will pass the test and which will not. 

- The automation script is created for just one input and is used for the rest of the similar inputs. - Data driven automation today has become critical and strategic necessity. 

- In the past, the software systems and applications were quite simple but today we have explosive web deployments and software systems and applications that require rigorous software testing. 

Now the question arises, “how to test such software systems and applications?” there are two answers to this:

1. Either we increase the number of people employed in manual testing or
2. We migrate to some greater level of test automation.

Data driven automation is often abbreviated to DDA. As the size and the complexity of the functionality grows, it becomes more and more laborious to test the functionality since the number of test cases also grows. 

In most of the tools like Winrunner, the data cannot be obtained from excel or notepad and so therefore it has to be taken from the data driven tables.