Introducing Golem, an Object Oriented C# Framework

Hello everyone, I am pleased to announce the release of Golem, an open source, object oriented C# framework, now available on GitHub.   Golem was an internal tool that ProtoTest has successfully used on a number of our clients' projects, and we like it so much we want to share it with everyone.  It supports a number of automation tools like Selenium-WebDriver, Appium, Microsoft's UIAutomation, and can even test REST services and validate HTTP Traffic.  Tests are written in Visual Studio, using MbUnit, and are executed using Gallio. It's an all-in-one automation tool for anyone working in a .Net environment.  Golem makes building clean, robust, reusable, and scale-able automation easy.  It's available in NuGet now!

Golem has a number of advantages :   

1. Simple, Object-Oriented API
2. Advanced features (data driven testing, parallel test execution)
3. Robust Reporting and Logging 
4. Multiple Automation Tools Supported
5. Fully configurable through an App.Config or through code.  

You can find our official announcement below : (Copied from ProtoTest's Blog)

Prepare yourselves; Golem is coming. A creature from myth and legend returns, reborn for the new age. In ancient folklore, a Golem is a mindless automaton, an unstoppable force, yet it obeys those bold enough to command it. And therein lies the danger, for it will perform any command given to it, faithfully and without rest. For it has no mind of its own, it requires an intelligent being to control it. But beware, the ancient proverb ‘He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount’ has never been truer: holding power is both addicting and hard to relinquish. Once the power of Golem is yours to command, you cannot go back.

 

Introducing Golem

At ProtoTest, we are passionate about the value of test automation. In fact, our motto is: “Automation makes humans more efficient, not less essential.” We think it is a great way to supplement any manual testing effort. Yet we see a number of people (and companies) struggling to implement test automation in a meaningful way.

There is a qualitative leap between recording and playing back a test and building an enterprise-scale automation suite maintained by dozens of people. This is where a test automation framework steps in. It helps to simplify the process of building, maintaining, and executing a large set of automated tests.

Most automation frameworks have three goals: to simplify the process of building tests, to help diagnose why tests fail, and to allow us to share and reuse code. And while there are a number of automation frameworks on the market, we could not find one that provided the level of simplicity, reusability, and elegance we wanted.

So, we decided to make our own. For the past several years, we have been building and tweaking our own framework in C#. We built the framework around MbUnit and Gallio, because they have advanced features for UI based automation. We included support for a number of tools like Selenium-WebDriver, Microsoft’s UIAutomation, and Appium.

Golem supports most commonly tested enterprise platforms: web browsers, mobile applications, Windows applications, HTTP traffic, and REST services. Tests are written using the industry standard, ‘page object,’ design pattern, and the test report includes as much diagnostic information as we could gather.

In addition, we added several advanced features like data driven testing and parallel test execution. Then we made all of it easily configurable. And now, we want to share it with the world. We are officially announcing the release of the Golem open source project, developed by ProtoTest.

The user group : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/prototest-golem
The source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/ProtoTest/ProtoTest.Golem
The package is available from nuget: https://www.nuget.org/packages/ProtoTest.Golem/
The documentation is available here : https://github.com/ProtoTest/ProtoTest.Golem/wiki