Automation Testing For Apps

Mobile testing has become a requirement and testers who want expand their testing knowledge and efficiency should be able to perform mobile testing as well. There is so much software now accessible from your browsers, and most of these websites have a matching app. If you are using Selenium for your testing, you are testing web applications, so there is a good chance that your company also has at least one mobile app.

So “ Can Selenium be used for mobile testing? ” The short answer would be “Not really”, but don’t despair just yet, there is a longer answer to that question.

The long answer would be: “You cannot use Selenium for mobile app testing, but there are frameworks based on/ compatiable / integratable with Selenium especially created for mobile automated testing. You can still use Selenium for mobile website testing.”

Things To Consider When Automating Mobile App Testing

• costs and assets

• integrated app development and testing cycle link

• tools and technology: test automation frameworks

• test coverage and reusability: open standards mean no vendor lock-in

• improve effectiveness and finalize sooner

Focus Areas In Testing For Mobile Apps And Games

• user interface and functionality

• graphics performance

• usability and user experience (i.e. good entertainment)

• multi-user features

• social integration

• security and liabilities

Good Mobile Test Automation Frameworks

• Appium: Executing Tests On Real Devices On A Cloud Service. Appium is a mobile test automation framework (and tool) for native, hybrid and mobile-web apps for iOS and Android. It uses JSONWireProtocol internally to interact with iOS and Android apps using Selenium’s WebDriver.

• Robotium is an Android test automation framework that fully supports native and hybrid applications. Robotium makes it easy to write powerful and robust automatic black-box UI tests for Android applications. With the support of Robotium, test case developers can write function, system and user acceptance test scenarios, spanning multiple Android activities.

• UIautomator, by Google, provides an efficient way to test UIs. It creates automated functional test cases that can be executed against apps on real Android devices and emulators. It includes a viewer, which is a GUI tool to scan and analyze the UI components of an Android app.

• Espresso, by Google, is a pretty new test automation framework that got open-sourced just last year, making it available for developers and testers to hammer out their UIs. Espresso has an API that is small, predictable, easy to learn and built on top of the Android instrumentation framework. You can quickly write concise and reliable Android UI tests with it.

• Calabash is a cross-platform test automation framework for Android and iOS native and hybrid applications. Calabash’s easy-to-understand syntax enables even non-technical people to create and execute automated acceptance tests for apps on both of these mobile platforms.

• Xamarin falls under the second category of hybrid app development. It helps you build a compiled hybrid app. With the help of Xamarin you can make a shared codebase in C# and build it for multiple platforms. One of the most difficult challenges for any development team looking to build native apps for both Android and iOS is the vast difference in both the programming languages (Java for Android and Objective C for iOS). Xamarin eliminates this barrier by using C#, and a translation process, to build a native application for either platform. A dependency service makes it possible to use a different code when it becomes necessary to access a platform-specific feature.