Trends And Tools For Mobile Test Automation

By Author: TomWade
Total Articles: 34
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Due to the excellent usability of mobile applications by millions of mobile end users, the mobile application landscape is growing across all business verticals. To gain more and more mobile users and convert them into customer base, most of the organizations have started creating their own app store market as per their customer preferences. This, however, poses challenges on the ability to support various types of mobile devices and operating systems like iOS, Android and Windows. Organizations therefore have to do such testing more often due to multiple OS upgrades, launch of new device models and releases of new mobile features. Such situations demand the need of mobile test automation, the relevant tools and understanding the current trends.
- Mobile Automation is not going to remain isolated. It will eventually integrate with multiple business channels and technical processes. Companies need to look for web, mobile and desktop application can be combined into a single strategy with the best reuse of knowledge, tools and innovations.

- Mobile Automation is not limited to the activities of QA alone. It can ...
... also be used by development teams for unit testing to find and prevent defects at source. Companies need to assess how automation tools can integrate with the development technology landscape in order to improve the overall development quality of the application.

- Companies need to ensure how automation can be enabled from anywhere, so that the entire development tools and QA teams have access to the tools and devices.

- Companies need to watch out for any interdependency between development and QA. Such code-intrusive tools need to be avoided along with such interdependencies.

- It is an added advantage if the mobile automation tool can also address the performance testing under the same investment.

Mobile Automation Testing Current Trends:
Every technical advancement brings new challenges in the world of mobile application testing . Recent trends in this field can be listed as follows:
- Tests that can run on a various language versions of the same application.

- An end-to-end mobile testing from the application build process to the test execution results – a process to achieve continuous integration.

- Ability to test the most recent device that has been launched in the market.

- Full test coverage by complementing test automation with exploratory manual testing.

Mobile Automation Testing Tools and how to evaluate them: More often testers are concerned on which mobile test automation tool is the best for testing the application. There are several must haves for a mobile test automation tool. All the tools will not satisfy all criteria. Hence, it is a project specific requirement as to concentrate on which criteria more and which can be taken lightly. The following table will help to evaluate an automation tool based on the criteria it meets.
Identification Criteria : Native ID Web HTML5(DOM) Commands,Image Recognition : Tools : UI Automation, Selenium, Robotium, MonkeyTalk

-Identification Criteria : OCR (Text Recognition) : Tools :Appium, Selenium, MonkeyTalk

-Identification Criteria :Ability to test devices which has been bought out from retail stores and test it as-is:Tools :MonkeyTalk, Appium, UI Automation, Robotium, Selenium.

- Identification Criteria : iOS(iPhone, iPad)Android:Tools :UI Automation, Appium, Robotium, Monkey Talk, Selenium

- Identification Criteria : Emulators,iOS (iPhone, iPad) , Android (inc. tablets) :Tools :UI Automation, Appium, Robotium, Monkey Talk, Selenium, See Test

- Identification Criteria : Plugs-in to existing test environment:Tools :Appium, Robotium, Selenium, See Test

- Identification Criteria : Recorder:Tools :Selenium, Robotium(Using TestDroid app), Appium, UIAutomation, MonkeyTalk, See Test

- Identification Criteria : Same OS - different devices:Tools :Appium, UIAutomation, MonkeyTalk, Robotium, Selenium, See Test

- Identification Criteria : Different OS – different devices:Tools :See Test, MonkeyTalk

- Identification Criteria : Serial Test Execution:Tools :Appium, Robotium, UIAutomation, Selenium, MonkeyTalk, See Test

- Identification Criteria : High Speed Test Execution:Tools :Selenium, UIAutomation, See Test

- Identification Criteria : Multi-touch:Tools :Appium, UIAutomation, Robotium, MonkeyTalk, See Test, Selenium

- Identification Criteria : Swipe:Tools :Appium, MonkeyTalk, Robotium, MonkeyTalk, See Test, Selenium

- Identification Criteria : Drag and drop:Tools :Appium, UIAutomation, Robotium, MonkeyTalk, See Test, Selenium

- Identification Criteria : Zoom:Tools :Appium, UIAutomation, Robotium, MonkeyTalk, See Test, Selenium

Identification Criteria : Scrolling:Tools :Appium, MonkeyTalk, Robotium, MonkeyTalk, See Test, Selenium

- Identification Criteria : Click on Security alerts:Tools :Appium, MonkeyTalk, Robotium, MonkeyTalk, See Test, Selenium

- Identification Criteria : Click on System Alerts:Tools :Appium, MonkeyTalk, Robotium, MonkeyTalk, See Test, Selenium

- Identification Criteria : Reboot device:Tools :Appium, Robotium, See Test, MonkeyTalk, Selenium, UIAutomation

- Identification Criteria : Awake device from sleep mode:Tools :Appium, UIAutomation, See Test, Robotium, MonkeyTalk

- Identification Criteria : Operate device Back, Call/Hang Call, Home, Menu buttons:Tools :Appium, UIAutomation, Robotium, MonkeyTalk, Selenium

- Identification Criteria : Device Connectivity - USB:Tools :Appium, UIAutomation, Robotium, MonkeyTalk, See Test, Selenium

- Identification Criteria : WiFi:Tools :MonkeyTalk, See Test

- Identification Criteria : Cloud (On-Site Private Cloud): Tools :See Test

Conclusion
Effective mobile automation testing can be achieved by following the trends and the best tools fit for the application under test. Several factors like availability and compatibility of tools, environment and network setup, UI, optimal system configurations, etc., are all considered effective for an efficient test automation of mobile applications.