Skip to main content

Benefits of Using Native Mobile Automation Tooling: Espresso and XCUITest

Image
By


Testing will be more efficient when testers and developers work in collaboration. Especially when it comes to automated testing, we have many challenging points that should be solved with the help of the other team members. This is a basic explanation of the cross-functional team. For mobile application automated end-to-end testing, this cross-functional team approach can be easily applied by contributing the same code base so native toolings give us this. This can increase the quality of the tests code and the framework by the feedback from the developers, and increase the quality of the tests by the feedback from the testers.

In this post, I want to give some idea about the benefits of using native mobile automation toolings such as Espresso and XCUITest.

What is Native Tooling

Native mobile automation toolings are integrated libraries to the mobile application development framework so that developers can write UI tests for the products under development. Native toolings are part of the development frameworks so it is always guaranteed that the tools are always up to date with the development frameworks and upcoming new features. Native toolings use the same development languages as the development frameworks so the contribution to tests and the application development would be similar approach and strategy.


Since we are talking about two major mobile device operating systems, we are just focusing on Android and iOS. Native mobile automation toolings are


  • Android - Espresso

  • iOS - XCUITest

How Native Toolings Work

Native tools work natively, which means that they are providing direct methods via APIs that are done inside the development project globally.  Interactions are made by directly calling the UI objects inside project architecture by the APIs. 

So these are the main benefits:

  • APIs know the state of the objects

  • We are free to use tools as black-box as well as contribute the development code as white-box

  • We are free to reach the UI objects

  • If the app is the Matrix, native tools are the agents                                     inside the matrix

How Espresso Works

Espresso is a test automation tool developed by Google for Android UI Tests. Espresso is open-source, very stable, and there are many frameworks have been developed around Espresso. 

  • It has a full feature-set of Junit that works with Espresso

  • Android Studio provides everything you need

  • It provides white-box testing

  • What Google says about it



This is a basic implementation for Espresso. You can see source code, unit tests as well as UI tests. For more information about the implementation, please check this project.

How XCUITests Works

XCUITest stands for Xcode User Interface Testing and it is UI automation framework for iOS applications. XCUITest is developed on top of XCTest and Accessibility. It is launched by Apple in 2015. It supports all iOS functionality in terms of testing them by white-box testing techniques.

  • XCUITest is native and inside the app source code with different target

  • XCode provides everything you need

  • It provides white-box testing

  • XCTest provides everything you need for testing capabilities

  • Accessibility provides UI interaction for all kinds of XCode product


This is a basic implementation for XCUITest. Again you can see source code, unit tests as well as UI tests. For more detail about the implementation please check this project.

Benefits: Handling Objects

Native toolings are inside the projects so no need to worry about the use of external tool to get the related objects. 


Espresso and XCUITest provides the following benefits

  • APIs provide methods for all kinds of object
  • Methods are always up-to-date with the latest improvements/updates
  • Freely update the source code for the sake of UI-test

Benefits: IDEs are Friendly

Android studio or the XCode comes with development experience so we use these experiences for the development of the test. Dependency management inside the projects IDEs allow us to write, run, debug the tests. Debugging for both android studio and XCode provides a great experience for real-time test writing.



Benefits: Servers -- NO

Performance is very important when you grow and have to handle hounderents tests. The main point for the performance is how much time your tests require for running them locally and in cloud services


  • Simple UI frameworks interact with the objects so no need to translate with servers

  • Native tooling know the state of the elements so no need to check them regularly

  • Automation code is inside the test package so no need to handle it differently while testing on the cloud. This reduces the time drastically



A simple test to compare the performance of the tools shows that native toolings are always better than Appium. This was done by TestProject engineers, so for more detail, please read this post.




Benefits: Team Building Around Quality

Better performance from an automation project can be only get when the developers and testers work cooperatively. Developers are always result-oriented people so they focus on the development of the features, but the QAs/SDETs must be keen on the quality. This quality not only the product quality but also the quality of the tests, process, and documentation. This can be achieved by cross-functional team building.

Cross-functional-team requires the followings:

  • Team spirit

  • Shared common knowledge, every team member should know basics about

    • What is being built

    • How things are developed

    • How things are being tested

  • The absence of one person from a role can be filled by another role

    • QA/SDET can be a developer

    • Developer can be QA/SDET




Labels:Software testing

Popular posts for software testing and automation

Selenium Error "Element is not currently interactable and may not be manipulated"

By
Selenium webdriver can drive different browsers like as Firefox, Chrome or Internet Explorer. These browsers actually cover the majority of internet users, so testing these browsers possibly covers the 90% of the internet users. However, there is no guaranty that the same automation scripts can work without a failure on these three browsers. For this reason, automation code should be error-prone for the browsers you want to cover. The following error is caught when the test script run for Chrome and Internet Explorer, but surprisingly there is no error for the Firefox. Selenium gives an error like below: Traceback (most recent call last):   File "D:\workspace\sample_project\sample_run.py", line 10, in <module>     m.login()   File "D:\workspace\ sample_project \test_case_imps.py", line 335, in login     driver.find_element_by_id("id_username").clear()   File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.35.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\r
Read more

Change Default Timeout and Wait Time of Capybara

By
One of the biggest challenge for automation is handling timeout problem. Most of the time, timeout is 60 seconds but it may sometimes not enough if you have badly designed asynchronous calls or the third party ajax calls. This makes handling timeout more complex. set large enough to tolerate network related problems. For Selenium based automation frameworks, like Capybara, default Webdriver timeout is set to Net::ReadTimeout (Net::ReadTimeout) Changing ReadTimeout If you have timeout problem for Capybara, it gives an error like above. This means that the page is not fully loaded in given timeout period. Even you can see that page is loaded correctly but webdriver wait until the Ajax calls finish. class BufferedIO #:nodoc: internal use only def initialize (io) @io = io @read_timeout = 60 @continue_timeout = nil @debug_output = nil @rbuf = '' end . . . . . def rbuf_fill beg
Read more

Create an Alias for Interactive Console Work: Selenium and Capybara

By
If you are working on shell most of the time Aliases are very helpfull and time saving. For testing purposes you can use Alias for getting ready your test suites. In this post, I want to explain both running Selenium and Capybara on console and creating aliases for each.  This post is for Windows machines, if you are using Unix-like see   this post . Creating Scripts for Selenium and Capybara First of all, it is assumed that you have installed Selenium and Capybara correctly and they work on your machines. If you haven't installed, you can see my previous posts. I am using the Selenium with Python and the Capybara with Ruby. You can use several different language for Selenium but Capybara works only with Ruby.  Create scripts in a directory called scripts (in your home folder, like as  ~/scripts ) for your automation tool as following, save them as capybara.rb, sel.py :  Creating Aliases Depends on your favourite shell, you need to add the alias to .bashrc bash
Read more

Page-Object Pattern for Selenium Test Automation with Python

By
Page-object model is a pattern that you can apply it to develop efficient automation framework. With the page-model, it is possible to minimize maintenance cost. Basically page-object means that your every page is inherited from a base class which includes basic functionalities for every page. If you have some new functionalities that every page should have, you can simple add it to the base class. Base class is like the following: In this part we are creating pages which are inherited from base page. Every page has its own functionalities written as python functions. Some functions return to a new page, it means that these functions leave the current page and produce a new page. You should write as much as functions you need in the assertion part because this is the only part you can use the webdriver functions to interact with web pages . This part can be evaluate as providing data to assertion part.   The last part is related to asserting your test cases against to the
Read more

Performance Testing on CI: Locust is running on Jenkins

By
For a successful Continuous Integration pipeline, there should be jobs for testing the performance of the application. It is necessary if the application is still performing well. Generally performance testing is thought as kinds of activities performed one step before going to live. In general approach it is true but don't forget to test your application's performance as soon as there is an testable software, such as an api end point, functions, and etc. For CI it is a good approach to testing performance after functional testing and just before the deployment of next stage. In this post, I want to share some info about Jenkins and Locust. In my previous post you can find some information about Locust and Jenkins. Jenkins operates the CI environment and Locust is a tool for performance testing. To run the Locust on Jenkins you need command line arguments which control the number of clients ,   hatch rate,  running locust without web interface and there should be so
Read more