Robot Framework is a keyword-driven test automation framework that is widely used for acceptance test-driven development to verify software systems’ functionality and quality. While automated testing scripts are developed to verify the functionalities of software systems (i.e., web services), ensuring the maintainability and correctness of automated testing scripts is vital in large-scale software projects, especially when multiple teams collaboratively develop test scripts in parallel. In this paper, we focus on how to facilitate the merging of pull requests (PRs) for projects that use the Robot Framework. We present findings from a two-year industry-academia collaboration involving three concurrently working teams, each consisting of six to eight members developing testing scripts for web services. Through detailed analysis of PR merging workflows, keyword usage patterns, and team coordination practices, we identify common bottlenecks, such as conflicting keyword dependency and unaligned script styles, that hinder efficient merging. Although the teams employ a Kanban approach, which helps limit tasks in progress, visualize workflows, and aim for continuous improvement, significant delays arose at the “Waiting for Merge” stage. Some pull requests remained unmerged for over a month, while more complex test cases could take up to two months. Our study proposes a set of best practices and an automated tool to streamline PR reviews, reduce merge conflicts, and enhance script maintainability. We discuss the observed outcomes, including improved collaboration metrics and reduced integration overhead, offering actionable insights for practitioners and researchers working with Robot Framework in multi-team environments.

The goal of developing automated web testing scripts is to assess the functionality and responsiveness of developed web pages via simulating user behaviors and interactions. Automated web testing uses HTML content that changes according to input events to determine the success of an interaction. When writing automation scripts, developers usually find it challenging to locate stable element constraints due to the rapid change of elements on the web pages or due to the wrong functionality assumption with a limited understanding of the test requirements. In this paper, to avoid labor and facilitate the process of checking the attributes or labels changed after input events, we propose an extension for the browser developer tool to identify HTML changes before and after automated input events. Within the developed tool, developers can access all HTML differences in the panel of the browser developer tool to check if any detail of HTML elements is changed because of automated input events. In addition, timing and filtering functions are also included in the developed tool to avoid unnecessary element comparisons and improve the stability of developed automated scripts. After real-world testing with both seasoned and junior developers, the developed tool extension can effectively reduce the development time by an average of 20 % to 30%.

Robot Framework is an extensible, keyword-driven, and Python-based test automation framework that is widely used for end-to-end acceptance testing or acceptance-driven test development (ATDD). The simplicity of its syntax also contributes to its excellent readability, making the naming of each keyword in test scripts particularly important. The name of a keyword should accurately describe its function, as it affects the time that code reviewers spend to understand its purpose or even the entire test case. Selecting a suitable name for keywords often requires a considerable amount of time. Therefore, a fixed naming format is a method to shorten this process. With a set of fixed naming rules, the structure of previously named similar actions' keywords can be directly copied to the current keyword being named. Additionally, a fixed naming format can significantly reduce the time spent searching for reused keywords. In addition to the aforementioned advantages, this study points out that the fixed naming format can also be used to directly convert test steps into corresponding action keywords during the test case design phase and proposes an effective automation tool to convert test steps into keywords for enhancing the value of test steps and saving test case development time. In situations where the test steps are well-structured, the conversion tool can accelerate test case development speed by extracting the action keywords of each test step and converting them into corresponding keywords.