Ukwikora: continuous inspection for keyword-driven testing

Abstract

Automation of acceptance test suites becomes necessary in the context of agile software development practices, which require rapid feedback on the quality of code changes. To this end, companies try to automate their acceptance tests as much as possible. Unfortunately, the growth of the automated test suites, by several automation testers, gives rise to potential test smells, i.e., poorly designed test code, being introduced in the test code base, which in turn may increase the cost of maintaining the code and creating new one. In this paper, we investigate this problem in the context of our industrial partner, BGL BNP Paribas, and introduce Ukwikora, an automated tool that statically analyzes acceptance test suites, enabling the continuous inspection of the test code base. Ukwikora targets code written in the Robot Framework syntax, a popular framework for writing Keyword-Driven tests. Ukwikora has been successfully deployed at BGL BNP Paribas, detecting issues otherwise unknown to the automation testers, such as the presence of duplicated test code, dead test code and dependency issues among the tests. The success of our case study reinforces the need for additional research and tooling for acceptance test suites.