Test Automation is adopted in many projects with the objective of reduction in testing cycle times, reduction in efforts and resources and in turn attaining more focus on testing the critical and complex areas of application that need to be tested manually.

 Many people believe that test automation is record and play back, but it is not true. Test Automation Framework will be best approach to automate an application. Before I explain about Automation Framework, I want to illustrate few disadvantages of automation without Framework.

It worked when I recorded it!
This is a common problem across most of the Test Automation projects where the “Capture and Replay” method is used for automation. Scripts work perfectly when they are created while recording the test cases and stop working after a while with the same objects or after a few minor modifications to the application

 Skills required by the testers to use the tool
Since the scripts have to be changed frequently with the changes in the application, the testers necessarily have to know the scripting language and a level competency is required to support such changes

Reusability
Without frameworks it becomes difficult to apply any automation methodologies like keywords or functional decomposition. This reduces the chances of having any reusable scripts and leads to bulky scripts making it difficult to manage. This increases the script maintainability

Standardization
Automation engineers working on different automation projects tend to have their own set of the design, structuring, coding standards of scripts.