Month: November 2019

Suyash Dubey | Posted on | 2 min Read

How to Choose The Right Automation Testing Tool

Test automation is gradually taking over manual testing as it saves time and improves the quality of testing. Especially in the case of regression testing, automation can improve efficiency by manifold. It is a waste of time and resources to do repetitive testing manually. Also, there is a scope for an error as repetitive testing can be exhausting but the chances of errors occurring in automation are slim. But what is automation testing? In simple terms, automation testing is replacing the manual human activity with a system that performs test cases by repeating predefined actions. To get the most out of automation it is necessary to select the right automation testing tool.
 

Types of Automation Testing Tools

 
Record & Replay: Tools in this category provide a recording option for the automated script. Every interaction on the screen like tapping, scrolling or typing will be recorded and converted into automation steps. The recorded scripts can be replayed to perform the actions and to verify the AUT.
 
Coordinate based recognition: Tools in this category interact with the application under test with the help of x/y coordinates, to automate and verify the application.
 
Native object recognition: Tools that use the native object recognition detect the UI or control elements on their given element tree. This tree is built by XPATH, XML or CSS to identify the elements, verify and automate the script.
 
Text recognition: Text recognition: Text recognition or (OCR) Optical Character Recognition tools identify elements based on their text. These tools use visible texts to drive automation and to verify the app.
 
Image recognition: These tools take screenshots of the UI elements in the product to add them to the automation scripts. The AUT will be automated with the help of these screenshots.
 
A lot of test automation tools support more than one recognition approach which can be useful to get more robust automation scripts. Now let us look at the factors to consider while selecting the automation testing tools.

Platform Support

Are you looking for automation testing tools for web apps or mobile apps? If mobile app then is it hybrid, native or PWA? The scripting language is also an important factor in many cases as mobile automation testing tools do not support all the languages. So if you developed your app using JavaScript then it’s not recommended to use UFT for test automation. In that case, go for a tool like Selenium that is flexible with the scripting language.
 
There are a lot of test automation tools that support freeware frameworks like Selenium and Appium. Framework integration helps in reducing the effort put into the testing and increasing the collaboration between the teams. Tool integration forms an ecosystem of a collaborative effort that helps in object identification, bug logging, test case management, report sharing, and shared repository.

Ease of Adoption

Ease of adoption can be measured on the basis of the skills required to use the tool and the learning curve. If there are resources available easily on the internet to learn the functioning of the tool then it is a plus point. Also, the support should be good and it’s an advantage if there is an active community that will give a rough idea about the complexities of the tool. We have observed that the installation process is also lengthy for some tools and frameworks. But overall the team should be able to use the tool easily with the skill set or the experience they have.

Ease of Scripting

Most of the automation testing tools provide flexible scripting options. It allows testing teams to write test scripts in their preferred languages. A good test automation tool helps in getting better reusability of test components and provides flexibility in scripts that can be reused across projects. Scripting time with object identification, speed of script execution, support for CI/CD tools like Jenkins, usually these attributes are considered before selecting the tool.

Integrations

If the testing team is using a test case or a bug management tool then the team would prefer an automation tool that can be easily integrated into those tools. It helps in managing the app development lifecycle properly.
 
The keyword-driven or data-driven automation framework should be easily integrated into any data source. It is convenient if the tool provides connectivity with different data sources easily.

Test Analytics

Analytical reports form the backbone of test automation as it provides insights into the success of the process. Automation tools must provide customizable dashboards to view different types of reports shared across various teams.
 
Real-time reports traceability and sharing ensure feature validation and efficient test coverage. Quality metrics such as injection rate, defect density, and test execution status allow you to maintain quality at every stage of continuous testing. It’s convenient to analyze results to identify bugs, patterns, and do a root cause analysis with a good automation tool.

License Type and Cost

It’s better to go for open-source tools but not every open-source automation tool has all the attributes that you might be looking for. Even if you opt for the proprietary licensed tools, you need to figure out how much you need to spend on the maintenance.
 
Some companies offer live support and training for premium plans. So you might want to upgrade to avail of these services. There is also something called runtime license if you just want to execute the automation on different machines. Apart from that, there are options for a node-locked license for a single machine and a concurrent floating license to use the tool on multiple systems.
 
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To Sum Up

If you are still confused and want to further simplify the tool selecting process, then use a tool comparison matrix. Jot down your preferred 2,3 or even 5 tools and then rate them on the basis of all the factors that we have discussed earlier in this blog. This way it will be easier to make a decision on the basis of your requirements.
 
As far as mobile test automation tools are concerned, device coverage holds the key. It is recommended to use a cloud-based testing platform to run your automated test on multiple devices. Automation is the soul of any CI/CD pipeline and for the successful implementation of DevOps, it is crucial to choose the right automation testing tools.
 

Suyash Dubey | Posted on | 2 min Read

Flutter App Automation Using Appium Flutter Driver

Flutter has been creating waves in the app development space since its launch. The reason is simple, it solves the problem of creating two different codebases for a single app to run on Android and iOS devices. Some experts say that Flutter which was launched by Google is to counter React Native which is used by Facebook. Nevertheless, this is a much-needed relief for enterprises as Flutter will help them save a lot of their time and resources. So let’s first understand what is Flutter.

What is Flutter

Flutter is an opensource mobile UI framework that can create Android and iOS apps from a single codebase. The Flutter framework includes the Flutter engine, Dart platform, the Foundation library, and design-specific widgets. Flutter apps are written in Dart programming language and runs on dart virtual machine.

How to Create a Flutter App

Before we start the process of app development it is important to know that there are two types of widgets, stateless and stateful. A stateless widget describes part of the UI by building a structure of other widgets that describe the UI more definitive. Stateful widgets are the widgets that can change their state multiple times and can be redrawn on to the screen any number of times while the app is in action.
 
To create a Flutter app you need to install Flutter SDK and other tools required to support the framework. We will create the app in Intelli J IDE and for that, you need to install two plugins. The first one is Dart and the second plugin is Flutter. You can install the plugins by clicking on File in the menu bar of the IDE and then click on Settings.
 
1

Then you need to create a new project and you will get a basic code layout to start with your app development. In the first line, we have the main method where we will enable the flutter driver extension and there is a run app method with MyApp class instance, to run the app.
 
Flutter stateless

In this sample code, we have used the title as the stateless widget and we have set the title as the key and for the home screen, we are using one more instance which is MyStatefulWidget(). So in this class, we have a small piece of code, where we have set values for elements like appBar, background color, and in the body, we have placed a floating action button for a counter.
 
flutter statefull

After adding the code you can run the program and you will be able to see the changed state of the counter with every click on the action button.
 
Flutter automation

Appium Flutter Driver

Appium Flutter driver is a test automation tool for flutter apps on multiple platforms. It is a part of the Appium mobile test automation tool. But how does the Appium Flutter driver work? It uses webSocket communication to carry WDIO script to instantiate the flutter driver and the request will be sent to the particular application. Then the AUT will send the response to the script through the Appium Flutter driver.

Appium Flutter driver
Appium Flutter driver

You can also build Appium in your machine through the source code. Once you have cloned the source code, run npm install then npm run built and type a command node to start the Appium server. You can download the package from GitHub. The package contains Appium Flutter Driver and Appium Flutter Finder. You can clone the sample project to get the WDIO code.
 
Flutter sample

In the terminal, you can see that to automate flutter application we have used Flutter as an automation name for both Android and iOS apps. You can see that port is 4723 and in the capabilities, we have mentioned osSpecificOps, automation name: ‘Flutter’. We have mentioned the app path at the top with the device name and platform name and we created an object.
 
Flutter Terminal

Appium==OS environment is ‘android’ which will pick all the information and specify in the capabilities and it will pass a post request to the server.
 
Now here we are trying to find the element using CounterTestFinder and a ButtonFinder to click on the button. In the next line, we have created a driver using a remote method.
 
Then we have switched the Native App context to Flutter. You can switch this if you are using the Flutter app. Once the app is launched, we are validating that the counter text finder has value as zero by calling Flutter APIs internally. So here we are using two actions, one is clicking and the other is touch.
 
Flutter code

The button is to be clicked two times and thus we have used strictEqual function. In the last line of code, we are deleting the session.
 
Now to run the test we need to pass the environment variable to connect the device.
 
Flutter demo

Then we will check if our Appium server is running.
 
Flutter Appium

Then once you run the code you will be able to see the actions performed on the device and the counter will change to two.
 
Flutter Appium automation

This is how you can automate your Android and iOS app testing using Appium Flutter driver. Although there are many benefits of using Flutter, there are some limitations as well. The first thing is that you need to learn Dart language to develop and automate the Flutter app.
 
Suppose you need to run automated tests on multiple devices, then you will have to fire multiple commands in the terminal. Appium flutter driver depends on Flutter Driver APIs and as it’s still not matured enough, some actions cannot be performed.