I’m going to continue introducing Symbiont in this post. In this post I’ll focus on the various ways that a script can be constructed.

I’ve talked about my automated testing framework Symbiont in a variety of posts. Because it’s been used in a variety of locations, I’m going to use this post to do a gentle introduction to the framework in a slightly different way than I have previously.

Since its inception my Symbiont framework has provided a wrapper for Watir WebDriver, which in turn provides a wrapper for Selenium WebDriver. One of the other major libraries out there that wraps Selenium is called Capybara. I wanted to see what kind of support I could provide for that. In this post I’ll cover these changes.

Symbiont is my open source test framework, distributed under the MIT license. This post will provide a quick tutorial on how you can evolve your script from a pure watir-webdriver implementation to one that is driven by Symbiont.

In the previous post in data setting, I talked about the start of a data builder pattern. Sometimes it’s nice to have your automation use descriptive phrases that stand in for specific bits of data. So here I’ll describe how Symbiont allows this by adhering to a data builder pattern.

In this post, I’ll explore how I’m starting to provide a data builder pattern with Symbiont. The specific focus is on how you supply data to page definitions as part of your automated test logic.

In the post on using page objects with Symbiont, the focus was on how Symbiont leverages the page object to allow test scripts to separate intent from implementation. This also allowed for test script logic to be concise in terms of its expression. Here I’m going to focus on how we can get even slightly more concise by adhering to a factory pattern.

In the post on going from Watir to Symbiont, I talked about how Symbiont encourages you to delegate as much as possible to the page definition. The reason for this being that page definitions get turned into page objects, thus allowing your scripts to rely on the page object to handle functionality, rather than having each automated script do so. Here I’ll explore that idea a bit more.

Encouraged a bit after the fact by a Ruby test framework in 15 minutes, along with my own post on a slimmed down Ruby test framework, and coupled with my Dialect experiment, I reworked an existing framework of mine (Symbiont) from another framework of mine (Fluent). Here I’ll explain how to get started with Symbiont.