December 2020 Summaries

We celebrated several significant firsts in 2020, including shifting to an all-remote workforce, hosting a virtual user conference with over 5,000 registrants from 98 countries, and launching our Open Source Program Office. We also reached three billion tests on the Sauce Labs platform, launched our second annual Continuous Testing Benchmark Report, acquired Elemental Selenium's content library, achieved SOC 2 Type 2 certification, and recently acquired API Fortress for modern API testing solutions. These milestones demonstrate our commitment to innovation, community engagement, and customer satisfaction.

In the final chapter of a six-part Tech Talk series, Wim Selles shares hidden features of Appium Desktop to help you advance your knowledge and take mobile test automation efforts to the next level. You've already learned how to configure an Android emulator and iOS simulator, set up Appium Desktop on your local machine, and connect it to cloud services. This final installment focuses on discovering many additional features that will further enhance your skills in using Appium Desktop for mobile app testing.

In this Tech Talk series, Wim Selles demonstrates how to connect an Appium Desktop session to cloud services like Sauce Labs for mobile app testing. The steps include uploading the app to the Sauce Labs cloud and setting up a testing environment with Android or iOS emulators or real devices. The user can inspect elements, interact with the emulator/simulator, and save configurations for faster future sessions.

The Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud has undergone significant enhancements in 2020, including the addition of camera image injection, same-day support for real devices, and extensive support for frameworks and operating systems. This has enabled users to efficiently perform functional tests on native, web, and hybrid mobile applications across a broad range of real devices, meeting specific business needs with private and public cloud options compatible with popular testing frameworks. The platform now offers zero-downtime deployments, allowing customers to receive fixes sooner and deliver value faster. Looking ahead to 2021, development teams are working on expanding real device cloud capabilities to support XCUITest and Espresso native frameworks, empowering native app developers to carry out test automation efforts at scale.

We had an exciting year with key enhancements to our Sauce Labs Live Testing solution that simplify the user experience, increase team collaboration, and ensure flawless app and website performance. Our product and development teams delivered features such as Android Debugger/Dev Tool, switching between app versions on iOS and Android devices, taking screenshots during live testing, testing with phone numbers for private devices, enhanced device settings, UX improvements, and more. These updates aim to improve the overall quality of our service, making it easier for developers to test their apps on real devices and browsers, while also providing a better experience for manual testers. With these enhancements, we are moving into 2021 with a continued focus on introducing user-centric capabilities, including features like Dev Tools for iOS devices, file uploads during live testing sessions, and key integrations with task tools.

Sauce Labs will be attending various industry conferences around the world over the next couple of months, including STPCon Fall 2019 in Boston, StarWest in Anaheim, and Selenium Conference in London. The company is also hosting Sauce Days, which offer a chance to meet with experts and learn about best practices for testing. Additionally, Sauce Labs is offering free attendance to its upcoming SauceCon 2020 in Austin, TX, for those who submit a speaking proposal by November 3rd.

In this chapter of the Tech Talk series, you will learn how to connect and use different versions of Appium with Appium Desktop, understanding its benefits as a first-time user. You will set up and download Appium on your local machine and explore two options for connecting to an Appium server: starting it while already running Appium Desktop or beginning a new session. The expert shares tips for successfully completing the process, ensuring you don't miss any steps.

API Fortress is a leading provider of modern API testing solutions for agile and DevOps teams. Sauce Labs has acquired API Fortress to offer customers a richer continuous testing experience with API testing capabilities added to its existing product lineup. The acquisition allows Sauce Labs to further invest in the developer community, facilitating collaboration between testers and developers. The integration will make life easier for developers by providing them with faster insight into failed tests, enabling them to spend more time on building modern API-driven applications.

In the third chapter of his Tech Talk series on becoming an Appium Desktop ninja, Wim Selles demonstrates how to set up Appium Desktop by connecting it to a configured iOS simulator or an Android emulator. He provides step-by-step instructions for downloading and navigating through the start window's three tabs: 'Simple', 'Advanced', and 'Preset'. The chapter focuses on inspecting UI elements of apps using the 'Appium Desktop inspector' session, while also highlighting key differences and pros/cons between running Android emulators versus iOS simulators.

Tech Talk: How to Become an Appium Desktop Ninja, Chapter 2 Wim Selles will teach you how to configure an Android emulator or an iOS simulator on your local machine in the second chapter of his six-part Tech Talk series. The prerequisites for setting up Android emulators and iOS simulators are reviewed, along with environment variables and specific tips for configuring the process in an interactive live demo session.

To get started with WebDriver's Java bindings in Eclipse, you'll need to install Eclipse, add a test framework such as JUnit, and a browser driver like ChromeDriver. You'll also need to set up Maven, a dependency manager, to manage your dependencies. Once you have all the necessary components, you can create a new project in Eclipse, add the WebDriver dependencies, and start writing tests. The process involves creating a test case, adding JUnit to your build path, and writing a test that interacts with the browser driver to execute a simple test. With this setup, you can run your tests using the "Run As" feature in Eclipse and see the results of your automated testing.

Sauce Labs has updated its Sauce Connect feature with new security improvements and bug fixes over the past two years. The update includes features such as a built-in HTTP proxy server that securely connects testing environments to websites or mobile apps hosted locally or behind a corporate firewall. To ensure data safety, Sauce Labs offers several security measures, including support for Apple's App Transport Security protocol and validation of command line inputs. The company has also introduced new certificate validation methods and will discontinue support for older versions of Sauce Connect in 2021, strongly encouraging customers to upgrade to the latest stable release, version 4.6.2. To take advantage of these improvements, users should follow specific steps to update their outdated versions of Sauce Connect, including using the latest OnDemand Jenkins plugin version and making routine updates to the Sauce Connect client. The company plans to make several fundamental changes in its backend in 2021, which will necessitate support for all previous versions of the Sauce Connect client being discontinued.

Docker containers are being leveraged to manage Sauce Connect tunnels in order to automate and scale this solution. This approach is useful for managing multiple applications that reside in different environments, creating high availability Sauce Connect tunnels on the same system, or no longer wanting to manage Sauce Connect versions. The Sauce Labs Support Team maintains an open source Docker image of Sauce Connect in Docker Hub, which can be pulled and run using the `docker pull` command and additional environment variables set for authentication. This approach also allows for easy integration with CI/CD pipelines and GitHub Actions, enabling users to automate their testing infrastructure and improve scalability and flexibility.

To become an Appium Desktop Ninja, you need to gain foundational knowledge of the open-source test automation framework, which allows teams to automate mobile applications on various platforms. With Appium Desktop, a graphical UI application for Windows, Mac, and Linux, you can execute automated tests on native and hybrid devices, inspect web elements, and more. The six-part Tech Talk series, led by Wim Selles, provides the necessary knowledge to get started with Appium Desktop, covering topics such as theory and background, configuration options, usage of the desktop application, managing different versions, integration with Sauce Labs, and hidden features. By following this series, you can successfully accomplish your mobile automation initiatives and become proficient in using Appium Desktop.