Test Automation Design Question

Question

I am analyzing automation design for an Intranet based web app with a limited user base:

• UI Layer
• Web Service Layer
• DB Layer

My Approach for automation is:

• Web Services layer Test automation
• Similate UI workflows with web services.
• I'm planning to cover 70% of automation with web services workflows
• Remaining 30% of End to End user scenarios from UI, UI Elements displayed, Web Service o/p to UI layer output Compared

Tools I'm planning to leverage:

• SOAP UI for web services / Data Driven Testing
• Selenium for UI Layer verification

Questions:

• Can SOAP UI be used to test work flows. Output of one web service passed as input to another web service ?
• I would like to know comments / feedback to apply best practices for this approach
• Testing can be performed From UI Results to Web Service output and check are they mapped correctly. In this case as well when web services functionality is core, Result mapping is the only check. I'm hoping verifying fields, values and running basic P1 cases at UI Layer would cover it. Any comments ?

Answer 1

SoapUI can be used to verify workflows, but so far, I've only been able to get it to work when they are ordered correctly. I've since discovered that it was much to write these tests programmatically (C#, Java). This allows for you to customize your workflow to how you need.

For your third question, although typically you would want to run it as an integration test, you could use the following scenario:

1. Have UI automation enter data into required inputs.
2. After submitting data (BDD may not be a good fit for this), pass same data to test method which tests your webservice
3. Validate repsonse from web service
4. Validate response from UI

This would be much better suited however to two seperate tests using the same data.