August 2014 Summaries

Appium is a rising star in mobile test automation, offering a philosophy that prioritizes flexibility, openness, and real-world user interactions. By interfacing with vendor-provided automation frameworks, Appium translates test code into platform-specific interactions, eliminating the need to recompile or modify apps. The framework utilizes the WebDriver API and JSON Wire Protocol, allowing users to write tests in their language of choice and easily incorporate them into existing workflows. With its open-source nature and rapid evolution, Appium is a popular choice among developers, providing a powerful tool for delivering great mobile apps to users.

Appy Friday! Sauce Labs' Support Team wants to help customers easily ramp up their mobile automated testing by providing an easy guide to integrating Appium with Sauce Labs. Appium is an open-source tool used to automate tests for mobile native, web, and hybrid applications, offering cross-platform capabilities and flexibility in writing and running tests. It was created by extending the Selenium Webdriver JSON Wire Protocol with extra API methods for mobile automation. The integration with Sauce Labs allows users to run tests on multiple platforms, including iOS and Android, using a single tool. Sauce Labs uses Appium as the server for their latest iOS simulators and Android emulators, making it easy to start testing with this powerful combination.

The Appium Bootcamp series by Dave Haeffner is a comprehensive guide for those new to mobile test automation with Appium. After completing the bootcamp, users can find additional resources such as official tutorials, community support forums, and professional support options. These resources cover topics like Android and iOS testing, UI automation, and troubleshooting. The Appium project also has its own set of documentation, including a book written by Jonathan Lipps, the Chief Architect of Appium. For Android-specific resources, users can find videos, Q&A sessions, and blog posts on how Google approaches Android testing. Similarly, for iOS-specific resources, there are links to Apple's documentation, videos, and guides on UI automation and accessibility. Additionally, users can search the Appium source code, file issues on Stack Overflow or with Google/Apple, and access a cheat sheet for top mobile app controls.

You can automate your test runs using a Continuous Integration (CI) server like Jenkins. To set up Jenkins, you download the latest war file and launch it from your terminal to access its web interface. You then create a new job for your Appium tests, configuring it to run your tests by specifying the command to execute shell scripts, which include commands to bundle update, run Android or iOS tests, and kill processes if they don't close cleanly. By adding these commands, you can automate your test runs to happen as part of the development workflow, allowing for faster software release cycles. You can also create jobs to run your tests on Sauce Labs by specifying environment variables and updating the rake command to specify 'sauce' as a location. With Jenkins, you can now configure your Appium tests to run based on various triggers, such as other CI jobs or schedules, to suit your development team's workflow.

CircleCI has integrated with Sauce Labs to enable secure cross-browser front-end testing on the cloud. This integration allows developers to run tests easily, without needing extensive configuration, and ensures that their applications work across various platforms and versions. With CircleCI's Continuous Integration service, developers can automate their testing process, and if needed, execute tests locally in a build container using Sauce Connect, a secure tunneling utility. The integration provides a hassle-free experience for developers, allowing them to focus on creating great software without managing the costs and hassles of supporting multiple systems and grids.

The Appium Bootcamp series by Dave Haeffner covers mobile test automation with Appium. The sixth chapter focuses on running tests and making them simple to launch using a command-line executor, which allows for easy addition of cloud execution capabilities. To accomplish this, libraries such as `rake` and `sauce_whisk` are used, along with the `appium_lib`. A new file called `Rakefile` is created to add tasks to launch tests locally or in Sauce Labs. The Rake tasks are updated to take an argument for the location, allowing for specifying whether to run tests locally or in Sauce. To work with Sauce, credentials must be specified at runtime, and test results can be made more descriptive by dynamically setting the job name and test status using RSpec configuration.

ruby The Appium Bootcamp is a series of posts by noted Selenium expert Dave Haeffner that cover the basics of mobile test automation with Appium. The fifth post in the series covers writing and refactoring tests for iOS and Android apps. It starts with setting up the necessary gems, including Bundler, RSpec, and Appium Lib, and then moves on to creating a test file using page objects to simplify the code and make it more reusable. The post also discusses how to use a central configuration file to set up the test environment for both iOS and Android devices. Finally, it covers how to run tests in the cloud and provides additional resources.

This is the fourth post in a series called Appium Bootcamp by noted Selenium expert Dave Haeffner. The bootcamp is designed for those who are new to mobile test automation with Appium, and no prior knowledge of Selenium is required. In this chapter, Dave collaborates with Matthew Edwards to bring us material on using similar actions (like click) along with wait mechanisms to make tests more resilient. They use the basic structure of the test apps they've been working with, which have text elements that take you to a dedicated page when clicked. The iOS and Android examples demonstrate how to automate this behavior, using text matches, clicks, and exact text matches, and also cover how to make these actions resilient against timing problems by employing explicit waits.