An Application Delivery Solutions company were facing issues in enhancing their existing Robot test automation framework to reduce turnaround time for their builds due to longer testing cycles. Constant changes to the test suites to improve the build quality lead to inter-dependence of test cases for prerequisite objects in the test rigs. This resulted in complexities in evaluating the test results. Opcito solved these problems by removing the interdependence of the test cases over time using various techniques like parallel execution, separate test rigs, etc. and using a key cache mechanism which helped in halving the testing cycle duration.

1. 1
Optimized Robot Test Automation
Framework Using Cache Mechanism

2. 2
Customer and the business challenge
Customer
A market leader in providing software-based application delivery solutions
The business challenge
• Need for enhancement in the existing test framework to cover complex
end-to-end functional and system test scenarios while keeping the test
execution time low
• The existing Robot framework (keyword driven) involved execution of a
certain set of commands repeatedly to verify the sanity of the testbed and
the presence of the pre-requisite objects needed for the actual testing. This
was taking up most of the test run-time.
• A lot of the test cases were interdependent on each other and hence the
final results needed a lot of debugging themselves before the actual test
results could be evaluated.

3. 3
Opcito’s solution
Revised automation architecture
Usage of higher level Robot framework keywords was enabled due to use of
certain libraries
Introduction of cache mechanism
Cache mechanism was utilized for caching details of pre-requisite objects and
faster execution of commands
Dedicated testbeds
Dedicated infrastructure allowed for test scenarios to be executed in a parallel
manner and made test cases independent of each other
The result
The cache mechanism and parallel execution of the test scenarios helped in
cutting down the test run-time to half and provided more clarity in reports
Tools, technologies, and frameworks used
Python, Robot, Jenkins, AWS, and VMware

4. 4
Block diagram and benefits
• End-to-end test coverage and faster bug detection
• Reduced test run time due to introduction of cache mechanism, parallel
execution and custom keywords

5. 5
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