Robot Framework in big projects

[Tatu Aalto]

Ugh

I have been building an automation project for my company and that project is growing more bigger than I did ever imagined. I have divided my keywords to four different layers: 

1) Libraries: like Selenium2Library

2) Resource: Robot resource which provides small setters and getters, on one view/page in our application. On this level user keywords are mainly based on library keywords and not on other user keywords

3) Service: Robot resource which provides services, like create user type of things. This level uses keywords from Resource level. 

4) Test level: Uses keywords mainly from Service level.

Now this model has worked pretty well but not I am staring to feel the pain of +2000 keywords in Robot data. It is coming quite nightmare to maintain, find or refactor keywords, this of course slows down the test creation, debugging, maintenance and other things. There are plenty of areas, on our product, which does not have any test automation, so I do see the that the keywords growth would stop anytime soon if we keep on track with the current model. But the maintenance burden is coming quite big and we need to find better way to handle the amount of keywords. So would anyone have good idea, how to maintain keywords in a big project?

I have been looking to the Page Object Library (POL) direction, because bulk of my keywords are based on Selenium2Library. Has some-one used the POL in real life, how it did turn out? any Pros/Cons that one should know of? Any better/good ideas? I know that POL is not being maintained but the idea seems very interesting (and tempting in my eyes) and could be also useful with other libraries well, if the keyword base grows to be big.

-Tatu