Best Practices For Effective Appium Test Automation In Agile Development

Today Agile development has become the go-to methodology for many software development projects due to its iterative approach and fast feedback loops. Within this paradigm, testing has grown into an integral component and automated testing is regarded as a cornerstone for ensuring high-quality, error-free software. Appium, an open-source, cross-platform mobile testing automation framework, has emerged as a top contender in the field of testing tools for mobile applications.

This article aims to delve into the best practices for effectively leveraging Appium for automated testing in an Agile development environment, enabling teams to deliver high-quality applications with increased efficiency and minimized human error. It will cover techniques that will optimize your test strategies, enhance the reliability of your test cases, and seamlessly integrate your testing framework within your Agile workflows.

Practices For Effective Appium Test Automation In Agile Development

Effective Appium test automation in Agile development requires a combination of best practices to ensure that the testing process is efficient, reliable, and aligned with the Agile principles. Here are some key best practices for Appium test automation in an Agile environment:

Plan And Define Test Scenarios

The crucial stage in cross-device testing involves planning and defining test scenarios. These scenarios are made to encapsulate all major key functionalities and user interactions for delivering exhaustive coverage. Hence, we should only create test scenarios that mirror real-world usage patterns across a wide variety of devices. This allows testers to pinpoint all potential issues in the app. It also guarantees the seamless operation of the app on myriad platforms.

Examples of some ordinary test scenarios can include user authentication, filling out forms, and UI interactions. These scenarios are created in a way so that they can accommodate different device capabilities, like varying screen sizes, input methods, and versions of operating systems. By taking into account the unique attributes of different devices, testers can create scenarios that rigorously test the app’s compatibility.

Appium, a flexible automation framework, empowers testers to automate these test scenarios across multiple devices. It offers a unified approach to test automation, letting testers write test scripts using a single codebase that can be run on various devices and operating systems. This bypasses the need for crafting individual test scripts for each device, hence saving time and resources.

By creating exhaustive test scenarios and utilizing Appium’s capabilities, testers can ensure their applications undergo thorough testing across numerous devices, thereby improving app compatibility and user satisfaction.

Use Page Object Model

In the lifecycle of an application, there are usually significant updates and modifications. As the application evolves, the locators pertaining to specific elements also undergo updates, causing older test scripts to become obsolete. This situation can result in a lot of tedious work and major revisions for Quality Assurance (QA) teams. This problem can be conveniently addressed by utilizing Page Object Model (POM) design patterns when creating test scripts. In this case, the tests interact with the page’s User Interface (UI) through methods originating from the page object class.

By implementing POM design patterns, only the code within the page object needs to be altered if there are changes to the page’s UI, eliminating the need to modify the tests themselves. Consequently, the locators used in the test script and the script itself are kept distinct. This separation ensures that changes in locators won’t necessitate widespread revisions across all test scripts. Appium supports this model very nicely. Hence it’s a must to incorporate into your practice list.

Use Appium Logs

The Appium Server possesses the capability to construct a robust log and reporting structure. Many find Appium Logs daunting because running a test script often generates a perplexing array of logs, providing details about the ongoing test script that are frequently puzzling and hard to comprehend. It’s beneficial to familiarize oneself with reading and utilizing Appium Logs. These logs are very informative and shed light on aspects like:

The logs often contain stack traces related to any errors that occurred during the test execution. These traces can be a valuable starting point for debugging and pinpointing errors that need to be rectified in the application or test script. The logs also display the desired and default capabilities specified in the test. These capabilities can help understand and alter the Appium server’s behaviour.

To maintain brevity in log lines, the Appium log doesn’t provide timestamps by default. However, if you initiate the Appium server with –log-timestamp, a timestamp will be prepended to each line. This feature is particularly useful when trying to determine the sources of sluggishness or potential bugs in code lines.

Parallelization

The objective of Test automation is to expedite testing, minimize errors, and reduce the need for human intervention. Hence, executing test scripts on a single device can be considered somewhat inefficient as it consumes more time and resources. In test automation, the goal should always be to run a test script on as many devices as possible, enabling the detection of compatibility issues, immediate results, and swift iteration on any discovered problems.

Parallel testing is one of the most effective strategies to accelerate automated testing. It’s a technique commonly employed in automation testing and shares a similar concept with multithreading. Parallelization involves executing numerous automated test scripts concurrently against various environment and device configurations, either locally or within the developer’s CI/CD pipeline.

Parallelization’s popularity in automation testing is understandable. It makes testing and development more Agile, leading to stronger and higher-quality test scripts. Also, by avoiding sequential test execution, a substantial amount of time is saved without compromising the quality of the tests in any way.

Capture Screenshots And Videos

In cross-device testing, obtaining screenshots and videos is highly important. These visual resources serve as useful documentation, assist in reporting bugs, and promote collaboration within teams. Taking screenshots during testing lets testers capture the application’s status at certain moments. These screenshots act as visual proof of any issues or bugs encountered during testing. They can be employed to accurately document and convey these problems to the development team.

Videos, on the other hand, offer a holistic perspective of the application’s performance and user interactions on various devices. They allow testers and stakeholders to check the application’s flow, spot any sort of hitches or inconsistencies, and acquire a better grasp of the user experience. Videos are especially beneficial in cases where we need to demonstrate intricate scenarios or exhibit the application’s responsiveness across a range of devices.

Appium, as a multifaceted automation framework, offers features which allow testers to easily capture screenshots and videos during test execution. Testers can utilize Appium’s APIs and libraries to programmatically take screenshots at some very specific points in their test scripts. Likewise, they can use Appium to record videos too of the entire test session. These capabilities enable testers to conveniently integrate screenshots and video capturing into their cross-device testing process.

Adopt Cloud Integration

In cross-device testing, cloud-based services have become indispensable. Digital experience testing platforms in the cloud, like LambdaTest, offer expansive device libraries and exhaustive testing capabilities. This eliminates the requirement for testers to own physical devices, as LambdaTest provides access to a broad spectrum of real devices hosted in the cloud.

Testers can conduct thorough compatibility testing across various operating systems, screen sizes, and hardware configurations without the cost of procuring a plethora of physical devices. Using device cloud services, such as LambdaTest, testers can attain extensive coverage and mitigate the risk of compatibility issues. Moreover, these services often include features like real-time debugging and parallel testing, further improving the testing process.

Device cloud services offer adaptability and scalability, enabling testers to effortlessly scale their testing efforts based on project necessities. As new devices and updates are introduced, testers can access additional devices as required, ensuring that their testing process remains flexible and up-to-date.

Use Right Locators

For successful testing of all application components, Quality Assurance (QA) professionals need to be adept at various Appium locator strategies. If scripts fail to identify the necessary elements, the entire automation process becomes ineffective. A common mistake in writing automation test scripts is excessive reliance on XPath locators. XPath can be employed in two distinct ways when crafting a script.

Absolute XPath: This is the precise path of the element, detailing the route from the root to the target element. While this may initially seem advantageous, the downside to this strategy is that any modification in the application can change the element’s absolute XPath. As a result, the test script needs to be updated with each change, making it laborious and impractical.

Relative XPath: Unlike the absolute path, the relative path doesn’t start from the root element and instead begins with the desired element. Thus, even if changes are made to the application, the element can still be located.

Therefore, if XPath has to be used, relative XPath is the preferable choice. However, XPath is generally not recommended for use in test scripts because it’s slow in locating the target element during execution. This performance drawback also varies across different browsers, with test script execution typically being the slowest on Internet Explorer. This occurs due to browsers using distinct rendering engines and rules, leading to variations in execution time when running test scripts with XPath locators.

Accessibility IDs are a more efficient alternative to XPath selectors. These locators are commonly used in test scripts for Android and iOS applications and are significantly easier and faster to use compared with XPath.

Use Wait

The effectiveness of any test script hinges entirely on its ability to accurately identify the elements of an application and automate various test cases according to the specifications given by the software development team. If the correct elements can’t be located, the test will lead to a false negative.

A common reason for a test failing to accurately locate an element, apart from the use of incorrect locators, is the lack of wait commands. If the application hasn’t fully loaded or experiences delays between pages, the script will be unable to use the locator to find the element. For these situations, incorporating wait commands is crucial.

Two main types of wait commands can be employed:

Explicit wait: This command instructs the Appium driver to pause until the element is located before advancing to the next line of code.

Implicit wait: This command directs the Appium driver to wait for a specified duration while repeatedly searching for the targeted element until either the element is located or the time expires. If a list of multiple elements is provided to the command, it will scan the page until at least one element is located or the specified time is exhausted.

Run Tests On Real Devices

The number of devices released annually is growing exponentially. This challenge, known as device fragmentation, is a primary focus of every testing team during application testing. To capture the largest potential user base, it’s crucial to ensure that the application operates reliably across a multitude of device/OS/browser combinations.

When it comes to testing across different devices, two potential options exist:

Emulators And Simulators: Though emulators and simulators are typically easier to set up and more cost-effective, they’re not the best choice for verifying an application’s functionality. Emulators may not behave and respond like a real device, so running test scripts on them does not guarantee functionality on the actual device.

Real Devices Or Real Device Cloud: One potential drawback to testing on actual devices is that device configuration and software setup can be time-consuming. However, there is a better alternative: using a cloud-based platform. It’s recommended to run Appium tests on a real device cloud.

Final Words

Appium is an automation framework designed to help testers detect bugs early in the development cycle and minimize manual testing efforts. To maximize the benefits of this testing framework, it’s essential to implement the best practices discussed above. These practices provide a roadmap to enhance the effectiveness and reliability of mobile automation testing.