staf-The Software Testing Automation Framework

The Software Testing Automation Framework (STAF) is an open source, multi-platform, multi-language framework designed around the idea of reusable components, called services (such as process invocation, resource management, logging, and monitoring). STAF removes the tedium of building an automation infrastructure, thus enabling you to focus on building your automation solution. The STAF framework provides the foundation upon which to build higher level solutions, and provides a pluggable approach supported across a large variety of platforms and languages.

STAF can be leveraged to help solve common industry problems, such as more frequent product cycles, less preparation time, reduced testing time, more platform. choices, more programming language choices, and increased National Language requirements. STAF can help in these areas since it is a proven and mature technology, promotes automation and reuse, has broad platform. and language support, and provides a common infrastructure across teams.

STAX is an execution engine which can help you thoroughly automate the distribution, execution, and results analysis of your testcases. STAX builds on top of three existing technologies, STAF, XML, and Python, to place great automation power in the hands of testers. STAX also provides a powerful GUI monitoring application which allows you to interact with and monitor the progress of your jobs. Some of the main features of STAX are: support for parallel execution, user-defined granularity of execution control, support for nested testcases, the ability to control the length of execution time, the ability to import modules at run-time, support for existing Python and Java modules and packages, and the ability to extend both the STAX language as well as the GUI monitoring application. Using these capabilities, you can build sophisticated scripts to automate your entire test environment, while ensuring maximum efficiency and control.

Other STAF services are also provided to help you to create an end-to-end automation solution. By using these services in your test cases and automated solutions, you can develop more robust, dynamic test cases and test environments.

We encourage the community to post patches, new features, new STAF services, etc. that enhance or extend the STAF project. Please seeMaking Contributions to STAFfor more information on how to do this.

Also, feel free to post a question via one of ourdiscussion forumsormailing lists. These are also good places to search for answers to questions, in addition to theFAQ,STAF User Guide,STAX User Guide, andother documentation.

Note that eWeek.com recently ran an article about the most important open-source applications. At the end they invited readers to write in letting them know about applications they missed. Then they ran an article containing the ones most often mentioned and their readers said STAF was one of the most important open-source applications. See the full articlehere. Thisslideis about STAF.