With the evolution of mobile
phones platforms from basic feature phones based on J2me/BREW to current date
smartphones powered by Android, iOS and WP8, the mobile applications have
evolved along with from simple few screen interactions to complex integrated
business solutions.
In the feature phone day’s as the
app’s were smaller in size and were built as few screen interactions to solve a
particular business problem all the functional testing was done manually. As
the underlining business logic started becoming complex, some of the developers
started writing unit test scripts for the mobile app business logic classes
& methods using the frameworks derived from JUnit such as JM Unit, B Unit
and OC Unit. These unit test scripts were checked-in into the source control
with the source code and integrated with continuous integration (CI) systems,
to execute automatically on every built.
As the complexity and size of the
mobile applications increased with device capabilities and processing power,
the apps require testing of large number of test cases that cannot be tested
manually in every release cycle and this created a need of a UI test automation
for mobile applications. This need gave birth to Image comparison (OCR based
tools) powered by VnC based tools and hardwired mobile phone dock’s with
camera’s mounted over the device screens. These tools provided basic record and
playback capabilities, with initial scripting support based on manually created
on-screen Image Object mapping repo’s. As these tools had the capabilities of
pushing key events and relaying the mobile screen content on a connected
computer for execution of automation scripts, they are also used for testing
automation of mobile application on remotely available device connected over
internet i.e. the services like device-anywhere.
With the increase in popularity
of iOS & Android platforms, people started using Instruments support
provided by the iOS platform SDK xcode and Robotium for Android. Testing with
Instruments required developing unit test type ‘scripts’ and executing then on
emulators or usb/wifi connected devices. QA engineers have to often revert to
development team for modification of these scripts to represent the modified or
required new test scenarios as none of these frameworks provided the
capabilities of recording the test scripts. These frameworks were able to
fulfill the need of functional test automation for the mobile apps, but were
not able to support with the need of UI test automation or execution of test
scripts on remote devices in different geographies and operator networks.
Next came in the wave of Object
comparison based test automation tool for mobile application; these tools
require instrumentation of the application source code with their automation
library. This library captures all the application objects, their properties
and user actions at the time of recording and replays user actions at the time
of execution to assert the object properties and give results. Some of this of
tools allow to execute test scripts only on USB/wifi connected devices, while
some others provides the capabilities execute test scripts on remote devices
connected over internet and hosted anywhere across the globe. Few of them allow
simulating desired environmental conditions at the time of recording and
execution along with senor data simulation. They also provide features like
adding assertions and regressions and editing of recorded test scripts for
advance users.
