Selenium or Appium! It Is The Right Choice For Mobile Apps!!
The complexity of software and reduced time in product development calls for test automation as a mandatory requirement for the QA group and as such essentially included in the quality analysis (QA) toolkit. Automation lowers development costs, shortens launch cycle, improves quality thereby gaining confidence of the service provided both for the company and the clients. Various open source automation tools are available to evaluate functionality, regression, performance, web, and, etc. One of the choice that any tester would love to include in his kit is Selenium Automation Testing tool, owing to its ease of use and open source nature. In addition, it is intuitive to use thereby converting a manual tester into an automation engineer. It is able to test software, website application, mobile apps and web apps to ensure a flawless user experience. The categories which it supports are as follows. Record playback functionality No specific technology or tools to write the script Option to execute the entire test suite or test case at a time Platform support Language support Support for various applications Support for various browsers Support for data driven testing Assertions/validations used in three modes as assert, verify and wait. Integration with Application Lifecycle Management(ALM) Availability of Selenium plugins for customization As mentioned earlier, it is applicable for mobile apps also. Let us investigate a bit more about selenium as mobile app testing tools. Though selenium is popular for web applications, yet it has not established its place to a greater extent in mobile. As you know, there are n number of mobile devices with various operating systems in the market. This gives rise to compatibility test to ensure that the apps are usable across multiple platforms so that thousands of users benefit when they use the application anywhere at anytime. However, practically it is not feasible to do a compatibility test on all the devices. Testers can use mobile simulators to counter this problem. Compatibility test is well-set by simulating the required features of the test with resources such as selenium, android SDK and Eclipse IDE ; Java, the scripting language and J Unit as framework. There is one more popular automation tool like selenium employed particularly for mobile apps that is 'Appium'. It works for native, hybrid and mobile-web apps for i OS and Android. Basically, Appium is the derivative of selenium, which interacts with iOS and Android apps using JSONWireProtocol and selenium's WebDriver. The significant benefits of Appium are as follows Appium is flexible and scalable in native mobile apps and game testing cross-platform framework helps to use identical script Appium scripts run on various browsers such as chrome, firefox, etc. Developers are free to use any development tools, environment and programming language suitable for real browsers or real devices In a nutshell, if you are familiar with selenium, there is no fear of learning curve with Appium. Either way, test automation is essential for success of apps. For more information Visit Here