Review: Robot Framework Test Automation (Bisht 2013)

During the past year, I’ve been lucky to meet many people new to Robot Framework and help them to get started in writing acceptance tests with it. While Robot Framework already comes with a nice Quick Start Guide and a very comprehensive User Guide, there’s still a lot room for good narratives on getting started with it. So, when I heard about a new book about Robot Framework, I was quite excited. Unfortunately, Robot Framework Test Automation (Bisht 2013) appeared not to be the book that I was waiting for.

Robot Framework Test Automation is a new Robot Framework book written by Sumit Bisht and published by Packt Publishing (Oct 2013). The book gives a nice (short) introduction to acceptance testing in general and a quite ok overview of the features available in Robot Framework. After reading the book, you should have a good idea of all the things that are possible with Robot Framework, but you might be confused of how all the presented topics are related and how to actually use them in practice.

While the book is a quick read to get familiar with most of the features and concepts in Robot Framework, it’s not a sufficient standalone guide for actually writing any tests with it. For example, the book uses a few different Robot Framework syntaxes inconsistently, and only a very few examples are complete (without downloading the bundled source code). In general, I would recommend to skip the examples in this book and learn the best practices from the examples in the official User Guide instead.

However, if you find both the official User Guide and Quick Start Guide too intimidating to get started with Robot Framework, you could try this book to learn the concepts and possibilities, and then return to the official guides for learning the details.

Disclaimer: I got a review copy of the book from Packt.