Automation Script Configurations

Context

At Xifin, I was responsible for creating code that could automate the manual entry of webforms. A simple enough concept that has been done for ages.

Problem

As anyone who writes E2E tests knows; as time goes on, the size of the codebase scales linearly and the difficulty to navigate said codebase scales exponentially. You will often find yourself repeating yourself as you write similar tests that perform only slightly different objectives.

The same problem applied to our automation scripts.

Solution

At first, I began writing functions that encapsulated code that was repeated. Only to see that function being called in dozens of scripts. So, instead of using javascript to organize the automation flow, I made it possible to create a script that would normally require 100+ lines of javascript to instead be created with about a dozen lines of json.

I even created a CLI assistant that would help you craft your script from scratch so you would not need to write the json yourself only answer a few questions.

This drastically improved my ability to create novel scripts and reduced our codebase size significantly allowing us to scale even more and tackle more complex projects with our extra time.