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Tamás Kőhegyi edited this page Jul 4, 2015 · 6 revisions

Introduction to Gepard

Developing test automation code is software development. Gepard is a test automation tool that provides basic functionality (parallel execution, multi-dimensional data driven approach, report logging) that is essential and must have parts of all test automation tasks. It is extendable to any kind of purpose, form Unit level test to final Acceptance test level, regardless the product under test, that can be a simple service, a powerful web application, or a native application.

This page is to collect all Gepard related information that is necessary for developing and using Gepard.

History

The tool was created in 2004. Can be separated into 2 parts: the core and the project specific extension. The core part can be split into several modules that supports specific test purposes, like: selenium-old (obsolete, won't be used in the future), android test. There is a special module named "examples" that shows several example test case implementations.

The core was very powerful that time, was possible to extend and use it with httpunit and htmlunit. A "wapunit" extension was created too - at the time when WAP was a promising Mobile protocol... Gepard was used for component level tests (Cactus) as well. Later swingunit extension was added. That time the core was finalized and become frozen. Then the tool was forgotten and kept in hybernated status till 2008. On a new project there was a need to replace the existing test automation approach and framework (Ruby + Watir) that was not performing well. After a little spike/investigation and a successful demo, Gepard (and Selenium) was selected. Since then it is in use again, and the tool was updated with the following features:

  • All obsolete and unused extensions were removed (htmlunit, httpunit, wapunit, swingunit)
  • Multi-threaded test execution was added
  • Concurrency and dependency handling was added
  • Data transfer between test cases and suites was added
  • Many little stability enhancements
  • Data Driven Test introduction, including Multi-Dimensional Data Driven Tests capability
  • API to crate additional data loaders (source of the data driven test is technically can be anything)

In 2014, to move it to open source community, its build tool was replaced from ant to gradle, the tool itself was modularized (core package was separated from other packages).

In 2015, Gepard was reviewed and its JUnit V3 based core (that is in use for Gepard version 3.x) was replaced with JUnit V4 - that is in use since Gepard version V4.x.

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