Extensible Test Framework

In short release cycle, most test software is written without clear thought on underlying plan. Nowadays, most software components are brought from different companies. The final product is the integration of the acquiring companies' product. When automating the test case, it is usually just implemented to suit for certain users' view depends on how broad knowledge the test developers have. How can we do systematic testing through discovery approach with limited time?

Lets say deployment testing. There are different ways to deploy an application to the server. Applications can be deployed via java application, ant tasks, scripting, and IDE etc. However, the correlation for deployment are between applications, deployment vehicle, procedures and verifiers. To study the relation to one another of different form of deployment processes, we can build an extensible test framework. i.e. Even we don't aware of scripting which can be counted as one kind of vehicle, we can still build the test components up and extend the vehicle when it is needed in the future.