With the growing popularity of mobile apps and the enormous growth in the number of mobile devices all around the world, mobile ecosystems are poised to further scale up. Until a couple of years ago, the IT world was dominated by web and enterprise application development and testing. With the growth of mobile apps around the world, the trend is shifting toward mobile development and testing as a niche skill set. Mobile testing had largely been manual until the advent of standard test automation libraries, such as Calabash and Appium.
This book is an effort toward gearing up a better testing workforce by making them educated and aware of a mobile testing and automation tool called Appium. Appium is the most widely adopted mobile test automation tool. The community support has been vibrant, but there is a lack of a structured step-by-step guide or documentation around building a framework. This book is an attempt to bridge that gap and serves as a handheld guide for each tester who wants to build their own mobile test automation framework from scratch.
This book is intended for developers and testers who want to learn mobile app testing and automation using Appium. The book takes you on a journey of understanding Appium and slowly gets you started with the test automation ecosystem. Cucumber is one of the most promising technologies, and is rising in popularity due to the wide adoption of the agile and behavior-driven development methodologies. This book introduces you to the concept of Cucumber and shows how you can build your own testing framework in Cucumber and Appium from scratch. It contains example code snippets of creating a sample project, writing first Appium tests, evolving the test framework, and setting up Jenkins.
The book is organized into two parts:
- Appium basics: This largely covers an understanding of Appium, desired capabilities in Appium, Appium inspector, and how to use it to find locators, test synchronization, and automate widely used gestures, such as tap, scroll, press, and long press.
- Appium advanced: This covers design patterns for the automation framework, how to run tests on actual devices and emulators, how to run tests on a Genymotion emulator, continuous integration with Jenkins, and Appium tips and tricks.
Chapter 1, Introduction to Appium, starts with an introduction to the mobile app. It talks about different types of mobile app, that is, native, hybrid, and mobile web. We then take a little closer look at the advantages and limitations of each type of mobile app. We learn about Appium's architecture and about two different automation frameworks Appium uses, XCUITest and UIAutomator2 for iOS and Android, respectively.
Chapter 2, Machine Setup, starts with instructions for setting up your machine in order to start using Appium and write automated tests. In this chapter, we address the setup for both Windows and Mac machines. Some of the prerequisites to install are the most recent Java, Android SDK, Genymotion Emulator, Appium, IntelliJ as the preferred IDE, and the app under test. We will also learn to create the sample Android emulator as well as the Genymotion emulator. We will learn how to install Appium, both via npm and the Appium GUI app. We will take a detailed look at the Appium GUI app and the iOS and Android settings Appium allows.
Chapter 3, Writing Your First Appium Test, helps us write our first Appium test. We will start by creating a Java project in IntelliJ and then get introduced to Cucumber. We create a sample feature file and write our first scenario using the Given-When-Then format. We will learn how to start Appium session and use Appium Inspector. We will then write our first automated test and learn how to run the cucumber test. We will also learn how to write our first test for mobile web app and learn how to use the Chrome developer tools to find the locators. We then run these tests via the IDE.
Chapter 4, Understanding Desired Capabilities, tells us about the concept of desired capabilities in Appium. We learn about the mandatory capabilities and the device-specific desired capabilities, such as Android and iOS. We will look into the server argument and the various flags it exposes along with its sample usage.
Chapter 5, Understanding Appium Inspector to Find Locators, shows us how to use the Appium inspector to find the locator of a UI element. We learn to derive the xPath over the Appium-generated xPath values. We looked into another tool, UIAutomatorViewer, and how to use it. We also learn how to debug the mobile apps using Chrome's inspect feature.
Chapter 6, How to Synchronize Tests, explores the different types of drivers Appium allows you to create, along with the various synchronization strategies. We will learn about the implicit wait, explicit wait, and fluent wait. We also learn about ExpectedConditions and the various predefined conditions it allows.
Chapter 7, How to Automate Gestures, explains implementing various gestures that Appium supports. We will learn how to implement the most frequently used gestures, such as tap, swipe, scroll, and drag and drop. We will also learn about the orientation and how to change the orientation of devices between the landscape and portrait modes.
Chapter 8, Design Patterns in Test Automation, covers the concept of the design pattern in test automation. In this chapter, we will take a detailed look at the page object pattern and then learn how to implement it in the current framework, which we have been building since Chapter 3, Writing Your First Appium Test. We will learn about assertions and where they belong, and we will also learn about the concepts of setup and teardown and how to implement them using pre-specified hooks in cucumber.
Chapter 9, How to Run Appium Test on Devices and Emulators, shows you how to connect physical devices and prepare them for development and testing purposes. It also demonstrates how to configure the Genymotion emulator and run tests. We learn how to retrieve the UDID of iOS devices, the libraries we need to install, and the process for running the test on iOS.
Chapter 10, Continuous Integration with Jenkins, teaches the concept of Gradle and writing Gradle tasks. We start by creating a Gradle task to run the test via command line and moving the project to Git. We navigate through downloading and installing Jenkins. We learn how to set up a Jenkins job and trigger it and view the report. This chapter explains how to implement continuous testing using Jenkins.
Chapter 11, Appium Tips and Tricks, shows you some tips and tricks in the form of code snippets, that can be used to make your test framework more intelligent and innovative. We will learn about switching between webviews and native views, taking screenshots, and recording video using adb commands. We will also explore the approach of running tests in parallel on multiple devices and about the network simulation API.
Chapter 12, Appium Desktop App, explores the new Appium Desktop App. It discusses in details about how to install the new Appium GUI app, how to start an appium server with basic and advanced options. It also explains how to use the Desired Capabilities while setting up a session and how to connect to different end points (the non local server).
By the end of this book, you will have learned about Appium, how to build a test automation framework from scratch in Cucumber and Appium, and how to set up Jenkins to run tests.
Appendix, Appendix takes a deeper insight into different how to's which are needed across chapters. It includes a deep dive into Cucumber and explains various concepts of Cucumber. It also talks about finding details needed for Appium for android installer. Very importantly, it tells us how to install the Google Play services on the Genymotion Emulator.
To get started with this book, you need basic knowledge of Java. You should be aware of the OOPS concept and should be able to use loops and define classes. A basic understanding of mobile apps and knowledge of Android would be an added advantage; however, it is not a must. The book provides hands-on experience with writing and executing code. There are some software prerequisites, which are explained in the second chapter, which helps set up the development environment and readies your machine for any future mobile automation work using Appium.
This book is intended for developers/testers who want to learn mobile automation using Appium. It doesn't require any prior experience in testing mobile applications or automation. This book serves as a detailed guide for Appium and a step-by-step guide to building a mobile test automation framework from scratch. The only prerequisite for this book is to have a basic knowledge of Java programming. By the end of this book, you would have gained advanced knowledge of Appium and would have learned how to build a framework in Cucumber and Appium. You will be able to leverage this framework building knowledge by replacing Appium with any other UI automation tool, such as Selenium.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "With version 1.6, Appium has provided support to UiAutomator 2. Appium uses the appium-android-bootstrap module to interact with UI Automator. "
A block of code is set as follows:
@Before
public void startAppiumServer() throws IOException {
AppiumDriverLocalService appiumService =
AppiumDriverLocalService.buildDefaultService();
appiumService.start();
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
automationName: XCUITestNew terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Clicking on Start Session will launch a new Appium inspector screen, as illustrated."
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