I have spent the better part of the last five years learning how to design effective and efficient test frameworks and libraries. I may actually be making progress. This post will detail a bit of why and show how the Dialect project has evolved into a radically new life form, albeit one that did exist before.

Dialect needs to support the idea of element definitions. Like assertion definitions, this is part of the generator concept, where methods are generated as part of Dialect’s operation. This is a core part of Dialect’s design that has to be as right as possible since pretty much everything else will flow from this.

As part of Dialect’s operation, I want page and activity definitions to be able to assert aspects of themselves. This is different from the “assertion” you might be used to in terms of testing logic. This post will cover what assertion definitions mean and get into one of the key design elements of Dialect: the generator.

Dialect supports the idea of evaluator methods. These will admittedly be some low-hanging fruit in terms of framework development, but they seemed like a good place to start. This post explains a bit about what an “evaluator” means and how they are used.

Dialect will use the concept of a platform object. Here I’ll explain what that means.

I’m starting yet another new test execution framework, called Dialect. I’ll be the first to admit any “dialect” posts will be self-serving in one respect: they will be my attempt to document to myself my own thought process as I go about creating the framework. That said, I definitely wish I had a resource like this when I was first starting out. So my hope is others will find value in what I’m providing, whether or not they ever use Dialect.