Chapter 7: Data-Driven Testing

One of the great things about test automation is the ability to try out many different things without getting bored. In fact, one of the heuristics I use for determining whether I should automate something is to ask myself whether what I am doing is boring. If I am working on boring and repetitive work, it's a good indicator that I might be working on something that should be automated.

Sometimes, creating test automation itself can get boring, though. You may want to create tests for several inputs to a request that are all quite similar. Creating good test cases can involve trying out many different inputs to the system. Automation is good at checking many things over and over, but it can take a lot of work to create separate requests for each of those inputs. So, rather than doing that and duplicating a lot of work, you can use something called data-driven testing to increase the efficiency of your automated tests.

This chapter will teach...