An open-source framework for cross-platform testing in agile projects

Agile methodologies have become popular in the software development industry because they improve the interaction among stakeholders, developers and project managers by achieving development results through shorter delivery times. One of the main problem with agile methodologies is the quality and the quantity of testing tasks to be performed, which in many cases are focused on unitary testing. This causes different issues for agile projects at the integration of sub-systems or the acceptance of the products developed. Continuous integration (CI) technique is commonly used to avoid some integration problems because it improves the validation of the software products by means of the automatic execution of different test cases at the moment of updating a software product located in a version control platform. Nevertheless, these test cases are manly focused on unitary testing and they are created for specific platforms. This paper presents an open source framework to improve continuous integration in order to execute acceptance test cases automatically. In particular, we use Behavioral Driven Development (BDD) to create the test cases that can be used with web and mobile drivers for different platforms. The framework proposed has been evaluated obtaining promising results.