Editions Tagged With 'iOS and Android'

One of the most common causes of instability or non-determinacy in tests is due to dependence on external services, like a backend API server. Often, when testing your app it is not really necessary to simultaneously test these backend services, and a 'mock' server can be used instead, which greatly increases both the speed and reliability of your tests.

Animations in mobile apps are part and parcel of the beautiful app experience we've all come to expect. They are, however, completely useless for testing. In this edition of the 'Fast and Reliable' series, we look at how to turn them off completely, or otherwise reduce them to speed up our tests and improve test stability.

You don't have to settle for 'default Appium'. If you find yourself in a place where you're experiencing issues, or want to try a different operational mode, there are a ton of desired capabilities you can check out that modulate the way Appium works under the hood. You might find that the problem you're experiencing has a well-known workaround in the form of a desired capability you can simply plug into your driver initialization.

Functional tests are kind of slow. It's sad, but it's a fact of life and something we don't need to get too concerned about if we remember that, just as in the Matrix, 'there is no spoon'! We can use a variety of techniques to set up app state directly, without having to automate the UI, so that our UI tests can test only the steps which we actually care about for a particular scenario.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, we need to interact with elements that Appium can't find as elements. What can we do when there's no element to call 'click()' on? Hacky things, that's what we do. But we do the hacky things as reliably as we can.

In this edition of the miniseries on speed and reliability of tests, we examine a very important aspect of writing any functional test: making sure that the app is in the state you expect before you attempt to interact with it. Here we learn how to ensure your assumptions about said state are correct.

Continuing a larger Appium Pro series on making tests more robust, in this episode we examine the various locator strategies available within Appium, when to use which, and other approaches and practices to making sure your elements are found and not lost.

In this article we start a series that takes a look at a collection of tips and best practices that all contribute to greater speed and reliability of your Appium tests. First off, we discuss the dreaded concept of test 'flakiness', and how we should approach this concept within the world of Appium.

Hybrid apps contain both native and web components, melded together in some ratio to provide a single unified app experience for the user. With Appium and the various Context commands, it's possible to successfully automate both halves of hybrid apps across both iOS and Android.

Both iOS and Android allow copying and pasting of text and other types of content. Apps can hook into this native clipboard and provide custom experiences based on clipboard content. Appium gives you special commands to automate the clipboard across both platforms.

Appium tests are full-UI functional tests. They can take a long time to run. It's a good idea to look for shortcuts so that your tests don't have to spend a ton of time setting up state, and can instead focus on just the bare minimum they need to validate. With a little work, you can accomplish this using deep links in both iOS and Android.

Appium is not just for native apps. One of the great things about Appium is being able to test multiple app modes. You can even use Appium to run tests against regular old web applications on mobile devices.