Testing on Mobile
Automating the Pain Away
Agenda
- The Why (~5 mins)
- Bugs and Regressions
- Safety Net
- Next Step: Continuous Integration
- The How (~10 mins)
- Different Testing Approaches
- Selenium as a Specification
- Appium
- hacktimenao
- A few demos from me (~5-10 mins)
- Prerequisites
- Mobile SDKs / Environments
- Appium
- Identify what you want to test
- Let's write tests!
Ohai! I'm Fil
Ohai! who r u?
Designer? Developer? QA?
Why Test?
Audience Poll: Who does it?
Dedicated QA department?
Developers?
Unclear?
Why Test?
Audience Poll: What kind of testing?
Manual?
Unit?
Integration / End-to-End / Selenium?
Quality is everyone's responsibility.
Bugs
They suck. We have to fix them.
There's something worse than just a bug, though...
Regressions
A bug that, at one point, was identified and fixed, but at a later date, crept back into the product.
One of the biggest embarassments as a team delivering a product.
Preventing Regressions
- You release version 1 of your product. Yay!
- You realize there's a bug in it. Boo...
-
You fix the bug, but then you also write a little program to verify that the bug doesn't exist.
This little program is a test! - You release version 2 of your product, which includes your bug fix. Yay!
- Now every time you make a change, you run your test, effectively preventing you from ever releasing that same bug again.
LMAO, RIP, Bug
The Power of Testing
Testing is a safety net.
You are future-proofing your product.
Testing is a discipline and is everyone's responsibility.
Continuous Integration
Next-Level Testing Power Up: The Holy Grail
It is Two Things:
Your tests being automated - fire and forget
Your automated test suite running on every commit.
How to Test
So many ways to approach testing your product - as many ways as there are to building it.
Testing Approaches
Different ways of experiencing and slicing your product up:
- Manual. Slow, error prone, human required.
- Unit. Testing code at the granular unit/module/class level.
- Visual. Does it look like what it's supposed to look like?
- Integration. Once you put all the pieces together, does it work?
We will be focussing on Integration testing, a.k.a. End-to-End testing.
Selenium For The Win
(aka WebDriver)
Selenium is a tool that enables automation. It tells other software to do things for you.
What is WebDriver?
It is commonly referred to as Selenium (for maximum confusion)
It is a specification.
The spec is for an HTTP API.
This HTTP API serves as an abstraction over proprietary, closed and/or differing automation APIs.
Free and open-source.
How Selenium Works
Where Does It Work?
Desktop browsers (the initial Selenium target)
Today, thanks to Appium, all kinds of mobile goodness, too!
What is Appium?
An implementation (+extension) of the WebDriver specification...
... designed specifically for mobile (Android, iOS, FirefoxOS) platforms...
... allowing automation of native, hybrid and web applications.
srsly, mix-and-matching native/web automation is an amazingly powerful tool for all kinds of mobile products
Let's Get Hacking!
A few demos from me
Let's get SDKs set up: developer.apple.com, developer.android.com
Get Appium set up!
npm install -g appium
or, if you're hardcore, github.com/appium/appium
Let's get everyone to writing a test!
My own set of tests as a starting point: github.com/filmaj/appium-test