  Test automation involves the automatic execution of test scripts instead of
being manually run. This significantly reduces the amount of manual effort
needed and thus is of great interest to the software testing industry. There
are two key problems in the existing tools and methods for test automation - a)
Creating an automation test script is essentially a code development task,
which most testers are not trained on; and b) the automation test script is
seldom readable, making the task of maintenance an effort intensive process. We
present the Accelerating Test Automation Platform (ATAP) which is aimed at
making test automation accessible to non-programmers. ATAP allows the creation
of an automation test script through a domain specific language based on
English. The English-like test scripts are automatically converted to machine
executable code using Selenium WebDriver. ATAP's English-like test script makes
it easy for non-programmers to author. The functional flow of an ATAP script is
easy to understand as well thus making maintenance simpler (you can understand
the flow of the test script when you revisit it many months later). ATAP has
been built around the Eclipse ecosystem and has been used in a real-life
testing project. We present the details of the implementation of ATAP and the
results from its usage in practice.
