Test automation frameworks are necessary for several reasons, including:

Efficiency: Automated tests can be run much faster and more frequently than manual tests, which can save a lot of time and resources.
Consistency: Automated tests can be run with the same inputs and expected outputs every time, ensuring consistent results.
Reduced human error: Automated tests remove the possibility of human error, which can lead to more accurate and reliable test results.
Reusability: Automated tests can be reused for different versions of the software, which can save time and effort.
Continuous integration: Automated tests can be integrated into continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, which can help identify and fix issues early in the development process.
Scalability: Automated tests can be used to test large and complex applications, which would be impractical or impossible to test manually.

1) What major changes you have done in your framework, can you explain the same?

Ans: This is a very tricky question, you should share the exact changes you have made for your framework. For example, you can consider using Retry Listeners to rerun failed test cases. You also need to explain how you have implemented the same.

Refer to the link to check How to Implement Retry Listeners in Automation Framework?

What is the Test Automation Framework?

Test Automation Framework is an Integral Part of Automation and it also makes sense also as designing & maintaining the Framework needs expertise. A test automation framework is a set of guidelines or rules that can be used to define test cases. These test cases can then be configured and implemented using test automation tools such as Selenium, Puppeteer, etc., to the delivery process via a CI_CD Pipeline.

A test automation framework will consist of practices and tools that are designed to create efficient test cases. These practices range from coding standards, test-data handling methods, object repository management, and managing access control to test environment and external tools, etc.

2) How do you calculate ROI for Test Automation?

Ans: By calculating and demonstrating Test Automation’s Return on Investment (ROI), we can be better convinced that the investment will be worthwhile in the long run. Delivering more quantitative numbers on building and maintaining a test automation framework may be more helpful to get everyone on board for Automation.

To calculate Automation ROI first you need to first calculate the Manual Execution time of your test case. This value can be updated in your Test Management Tool.

You can use the formula to calculate ROI:

Time Saved by Automation =Manual Execution Time - Automation Execution Time

Automation ROI = Time Saved by Automation / Investment.

Investment = time required to build frameworks + maintenance cost + (time to code one tests X number of tests)

Hope you will be able to implement the same in your project.

3) Explain the challenges you faced while designing Framework?

Ans: This is a very tricky question to figure out how much exposure you have working with Automation. So sharing an honest answer would always be good.

Let me give an example: You are working on some service API testing and you are unable to get to perform the automation as you don't have access to some component, in that you can come up with idea to create mocking service integrated to your framework.

4) What is the reporting structure you use in your framework?

Ans: As we all know that proper HTML reporting is very important for Automation. So never answer that you don't have a reporting structure in your framework. There are many reporting ways available for framework, once of the most used ones is Extent Reporting.

You also need to provide a preview of the extent reporting implementation in Framework, please refer to the post here on Extent Report Integration with Framework

5) Have you worked on automation framework design from scratch?

Ans: This is a very important question and you should be completely honest with this answer, if you designed some framework then do explain what was the design patterns you have used and what all libraries you have integrated to design your framework.

Else you can say that you haven't designed anything from scratch but you have participated in Framework Enhancements in terms of CI-CD integration or HTML reporting.

******************

What are the Locators used for Mobile Automation Testing?

**************************

6) Can you tell me why a Test Automation Framework is required?

1. We want to organize and standardize the test suite, which will further help in:

Reuse of test code
Ease with which test cases can be added

2. We want to be able to provide a way to organize groups of test cases. This will enable us to run specific tests.

3. Provide a layer of abstraction to protect the test suite against changes in service call protocols in order to minimize changes to the test code.

4. Decoupling the test cases from the automation code could lead to test automation misses, lack of visibility of mapping between the test case to test function. Hence, we want to provide mapping between test cases to its corresponding automation function.

5. We want to be able to run our tests on any endpoint including the development desktops, all stages of the environment (DEVO/BETA/GAMMA etc), to enable integration testing on them.

6. We want to be able to use standard tools for reporting test runs, collecting metrics, deployments.

7) How your team managing Automation Test Suites?

In our team we basically use Groups in TestNG to manage different Test Suites like Sanity, Regression.

TestNG allows us to perform sophisticated groupings of test methods. Not only can we declare that methods belong to groups, but we can also specify groups that contain other groups. Then TestNG can be invoked and asked to include a certain set of groups while excluding another set. This gives us maximum flexibility in how we partition our tests. Example:


         @Test(groups={"sanitytest","regressiontest"})

8) Do you know what is Mocking and have you ever used it in your framework or writing tests?

Ans: Mocking in programming refers to an action of substituting a part of the software with its fake counterpart. It is super useful with API Test Frameworks.

Please refer post here on What is Mocking and How to use Mock to Write API Tests?

9) Can you tell me about the type of class you have in your utility package?

Ans: util package in Java is a package which contains various utility classes and interfaces. It provides basic functionality for commonly occurring use cases.

Some of the classes we have in our framework are:
- ExtentReport
- ScreenShotUtility
- JsonReader
- RetryListener
- StringUtil
- AssertionService

10) How are you scheduling your Automation Suite Execution?

The best way to manage your Automation Suite execution is by integrating the same with pipeline CICD, like Jenkins, CircleCI.

Check out the posts here to Run Scheduled Automation Suite Job From Jenkins

11) If you want to execute your maven suite in dev-desktop or linux instance then what steps would you follow to install Maven into the Linux machine?