Working with STAF

STAF (software testing automation framework) is designed for reusable components called services. STAF is a remote agent used to control the test on various machines.for making easier to create automated test cases and workloads. it works on Windows,Linux,AS/400,MVS.

Concepts of STAF

1).STAFProc

2).STAF services
a)Internal services are within the STAFProc which means they are always available
and having the constant names.
b)External services are outside the STAFProc which means they are always from
outside for example from the java,c++ etc.
c)Custom services are always the external services then can also be written in our
custom and can be plugged into STAF.

3).Queues and handles

4).Variables

5).Security

6).Submitting Staf requests.

Configuration file:
After installing the Staf, in order to get the access to local machines, trust level has to be given and java sdk is needed for running the staf.

TRUST LEVEL 5 MACHINE tcp://local machine name or ip address.*

you can find the STAF.CFG file in the bin folder of STAF. You can also alter many features in the configuration file like

1).Specify the network interfaces

2).Define operational parameters

3).Define global variables

4).Specify the security access

5).Define startup/shutdown process

6).Enable and configure tracing

7).Register and configure external services

The idea behind STAF is to run a very simple agent on all the machines that participate in the STAF testbed. Every machine can then run services on any other machine, subject to a so-called trust level. In practice, one machine will act as what I called the 'test management' machine, and will coordinate the test runs by sending jobs to the test clients. STAX is one of the services offered on top of the low-level STAF plumbing. It greatly facilitates the distribution of jobs to the test clients and the collection and logging of test results. STAX jobs are XML files spiced up with special tags that contain Python code (actually Jython, but there are no differences for the purpose of this tutorial). This in itself was for us a major reason for choosing STAF over other solutions.