Localizing Your Acceptance Tests With The Robot Framework

When doing acceptance test driven development, the team writes the tests often by first specifying the behaviour, and then supporting that with a table of examples. How that generally works with the Robot Framework, was already described earlier . As executable specification, those automated tests have to be understandable by all stakeholders. By all means, this includes that they should be written in everybody’s mother tounge – and more often than not, this is not English. This currently does not work with the Robot Framework, does it?
With a simple resource file, you can easily work around that issue, until it will be solved with the forthcoming Robot Framework 2.5 .

1*** Settings ***
2 
3 
4*** Keywords ***
5Gegeben ${keyword}
6    Run Keyword  ${keyword}
7 
8Sei ${keyword}
9    Run Keyword  ${keyword}
10 
11Wenn ${keyword}
12    Run Keyword  ${keyword}
13 
14Dann ${keyword}
15    Run Keyword  ${keyword}
16 
17Und ${keyword}
18    Run Keyword  ${keyword}

Now a test can be written easily, like shown in the example below:

1*** Settings ***
2Resource        ${RESOURCES}/German-BDD.txt
3 
4*** Keyword ***
5Verhalten
6    [Arguments]  ${arg1}  ${xyz}
7 
8    Sei dies, und auch ${arg1} noch gegeben
9    Und das hier ebenso
10 
11    Wenn dann jenes geschieht
12    Und folgendes danach
13 
14    Dann ist diese Situation eingetreten
15    Und die Daten ${xyz} befinden sich in der Datenbank
16    Und übrgens, Umlaute und Kommata in Keywords funktionieren auch
17 
18| *Test Case* | | *arg1* | *xyz* |
19| 1 | Verhalten |    123 |   234 |

Note that this even works with Umlauts and punctuation marks – in Python and in Jython. A fact, that pleasantly surprised me today 🙂