Mark Bayazit blogs about creating and Using Data-Driven functional tests

” Websites and web-applications have become technically complex, leading to a need for advanced automated test scripts that can validate their functionality. These scripts typically “walk through” a specific process and check to make sure certain actions and objects operate as expected. As the user provides different input into these web-applications, they change their behavior or present different datasets, prompts, or error messages, so it is not enough to simply run scripts with one set of values. Instead, the script needs to be able to run many different iterations of the same test, each with a different set of values. The ability to take actions (like entering text, choosing a radio-button, clicking a link, or validating returned content) dynamically is called parameterization, and a test that does this is often referred to as a “parameterized” or “data-driven” test.”

http://www.jadeliquid.com/blogs/2009/creating-data-driven-functional-tests-with-liquidtest.php - http://www.jadeliquid.com/blogs/2009/creating-data-driven-functional-tests-with-liquidtest.php