What is the Robot Framework?

The Robot Framework is an open source, general purpose test automation framework used for acceptance testing and streamlines it into mainstream development, giving rise to the concept of acceptance test driven development (ATDD). While commercial and in-house automated testing tools have been used traditionally to provide this kind of test automation. It suffers from the problem of reinventing the wheel and vendor lock-in as well as lack of flexibility to use tests with different software and under different circumstances. It stands out from other tools used for the same purpose by working on easy-to-use tabular test files that provide different approaches towards test creation. As different projects require acceptance testing in various ways, there is a need to make tests flexible, as the Robot Framework is flexible and extensible enough for handling these scenarios.

It is the extensible nature of the tool that makes it so versatile that it can be adjusted into different scenarios and used with different software backend. While it is most popularly used with selenium as a website automation tool, it can also be used with image-based testing software like sikuli and also with software that require remote access over multiple machines while only running the tests over a given machine. All of these can be made easily available through creation of custom libraries, which link up the Robot Framework configuration code keywords with tasks associated with whatever software the Robot Framework is using. On the other hand, the output that the framework produces can also be used in multiple ways, first of which is the HTML report and log file that not only produces a XUnit styled output, but also contains test operations in detail while signifying the execution order and test hierarchy of entire tests. This contrasts with the optional .xml generation that can be useful in further manipulation of the processes. One such example is creation of customized programs that use the information obtained by running tests to create a wide variety of results. Another example is the log files' subsequent use in continuous delivery environments that can allow a build to continue or fail based on all the individual acceptance tests which are in use.

It was created by Pekka Kl?rck as part of his master's thesis (http://eliga.fi/Thesis-Pekka-Laukkanen.pdf) and was developed within Nokia Siemens Networks in 2005. Its second version has been open sourced under Apache License, Version 2 since 2008 and has an active community of volunteers. It is available at http://code.google.com/p/robotframework.