Introduction

The Software Testing Automation Framework (STAF) is an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 project that enables users to create cross-platform

Cross-platform

In computing, cross-platform, or multi-platform, is an attribute conferred to computer software or computing methods and concepts that are implemented and inter-operate on multiple computer platforms...

, distributed

Distributed computing

Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...

 software test environments.

Services

STAF includes a number of services that provide specific functionality. The most prominent of these is called the STAf eXecution engine (STAX), which executes test scripts. Other services provide cron

Cron

Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. Cron enables users to schedule jobs to run periodically at certain times or dates...

, file system

File system

A file system is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device which contain it. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the...

, inter-process communication, e-mail

E-mail

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

, and HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 support, among others. The documentation includes instructions and guidelines for developers to generate their own custom services, as well.

Support

IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

supports users of STAF through extensive online documentation and user forums, accessible via the STAF website.

External links

• Software Testing Automation Framework (STAF)