What is a good approach to write Automated tests that depend on data that needs to be setup before executing the test

Question

I am currently working on writing automated tests using Selenium Webdriver. We use MTM to run our test suites. I need some ideas as to what would be a good way to write these tests. Currently before running these tests, we perform a basic setup that sets the username and password that would be required to login to the site, set the browser that the test should use, and few other things.

Currently the data that is required for each of the test is setup manually and is already present in the database . The test simply performs a keyword search, finds the necessary data it needs and then performs the assertions. What we would like to achieve is find such data that is already present in the database and use it instead of creating it manually. That way I can run these tests across different environments(dev,qa,production).

The site I am testing is an e-commerce website. I mostly write tests for specific features that my team develops, and thus many of these tests require some specific data. e.g setting up a store that has products with certain shipping rates, with particular offers etc. I would like to find a way to automate or almost remove this manual process of setting up the data. That way I have the flexibility to run these tests across environments. Could you please direct me to some articles/suggestions that can help me achieve this ?

Answer 1

If I am understanding your question correctly, you want to automate the test data setup. You can achieve this in following ways:

1. If possible, write a sql script which inserts the desired data in db. Now you can execute this while running your tests. If you are using TestNG framework, then there is already an annotation available like @BeforeTest. You can execute that sql script in this annotation, it will be executed once before your test and data is ready.

2. Prepare data in a spreadsheet. Create an algorithm, fill the data dynamically in spreadsheet and from there either read directly and fetch it to your test using @BeforeTest or if required, data in spreadsheet can be inserted in db also.