The test framework must be easy to expand, maintain, and perpetuate.
One of our goals should be a highly modular and maintainable framework. Generally, each module should be independent and separate from all the other modules. What happens inside one is of no concern to the others.
With this modular black-box approach, the functionality available within each module can be readily expanded without affecting any other part of the system. This makes code maintenance much simpler. Additionally, the complexity of any one module will likely be quite minimal.
However, modularity alone will not be enough to ensure a highly maintainable framework. Like any good software project, our design must be fully documented and published. Without adequate, published documentation it will be very difficult for anyone to decipher what it is the framework is designed to do. Any hope of maintenance will not last far beyond the departure of the original framework designers. Our test automation efforts will eventually become another negative statistic.
To prevent this, we should define documentation standards and templates. Wherever possible, module documentation should be developed "in-context". That is, directly in the source code itself. Tools should be retained, or designed and developed, so that we can automatically extract and publish the documentation. This will eliminate the task of maintaining two separate sets of files: the source code, and its documentation. It will also provide those doing the code maintenance quite a ready reference. Nearly everything they need to know should exist right there in the code.
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