The Creation of a Software Testing Meta Framework; The Test Object Model

Typically an organization's testing environment consists of a collection of not only, hardware, but software tools, solutions, customizations, policies and procedures. This paper proposes that testing organizations benefit from the creation of a Test Object Model (TOM) which is a representation of the organization's environment and provides a set of more complete and customized definitions of terms for the organization. Ideally, these definitions are consistent with industry standards, but in reality that is not always practical. All test organizations are unique and the TOM of each organization will likely differ, sometimes significantly. This proposal does not prescribe any particular format for the representation of the TOM but recommends a minimum level of detail that the TOM should include. By performing a level of object-oriented analysis upon themselves, testing organizations are better able to select vendor tools, create homegrown solutions, and design and implement frameworks for both manual and automated testing.