I've been asking myself the same question for the past two years, ever since I first became an automation developer: I wonder if I can figure out how to create a mobile automation framework? We already started covering the basic building blocks:
Learning Serenity BDD:
If you need more of an introduction to what is Appiun, Appium Docker, and what Appium can do, view:
"Dan Cuellar was the Test Manager at Zoosk in 2011, when he encountered a problem. The length of the test passes on the iOS product was getting out of hand. Less testing was an option, but would come with additional risk, especially with it taking several days to get patches through the iOS App Store Review process. He thought back to his days working on websites and realized automation was the answer.
"Dan surveyed the existing landscape of tools, only to find that all of them hand major drawbacks. The tool supplied by Apple, UIAutomation, required tests to be written in JavaScript, and did not allow for real time debugging or interpretation. It also had to be executed inside the Xcode profiling tool, Instruments. Other 3rd-party tools used private APIs and required SDKs and HTTP Servers to be embedded into the application. This seemed highly undesirable.
"Unsatisfied with the existing options, Dan asked his manager for some additional time to see if he could find a better way. He spent 2 weeks poking and prodding around to see if there was a way to use approved Apple technologies to automate an iOS application. The first implementation he tried used AppleScript to send messages to Mac UI elements using the OS X accessibility APIs. This worked to some degree, but would never work on real devices, not to mention other drawbacks.
"So he thought, what if I could get the UIAutomation framework to run in real time like an interpreter? [ READ MORE ]
Jason Huggins, who created the first version of Selenium at Thoughtworks ,then teamed up with Simon Stewart at Google to make Selenium WebDriver, founded a company where if you were doing software test automation, you could use their devices-in-a-cloud to test on. That company was Sauce Labs.
Learning Serenity BDD:
- Serenity BDD with Cucumber, formats tests to be in an easy-to-read Given / Then / When format for feature files, which then can be broken down into step definitions. This is what is already being used in my current position.
- Serenity BDD gives us easy-to-read reports. Picture the Given / Then / When as a summary report where you can drill down in the report to see the individual steps, how they were carried out, and which individual step passed or failed.
This section will cover Learning Appium Desktop:
- Appium Desktop is a web based product used to inspect iOS and Android apps so I can determine a locator strategy for my eventual mobile automation test framework I will be building.
- Appium Desktop comes with Appium 1.6.4-beta as the server. We will be covering basic concepts of Appium, and doing a deep-dive on many of the Android Command Line Tools used.
- Although Appium allows both OS and Android, I was going to focus just on Android first, configuring both physical and virtual devices.
- I will be setting everything up on my Macbook. Why? I really like the Mac Terminal as a Command Line Interface.
If you need more of an introduction to what is Appiun, Appium Docker, and what Appium can do, view:
- Webinar Notes: Appium, Prime Cuts, by Dan Cuellar
- Webinar Notes: An Introduction to Appium Desktop by Johnathan Lipps.
- SeConf2017: Rethinking Appium’s Code Base, Notes
- SeConf2017: Security Testing, Dockerizing Tests using Appium, Notes
- SeConf2017: Microsoft is automating Windows, Intuit automating Mac Apps, all with Appium!
What is Appium?
From Appium History: http://appium.io/history.html"Dan Cuellar was the Test Manager at Zoosk in 2011, when he encountered a problem. The length of the test passes on the iOS product was getting out of hand. Less testing was an option, but would come with additional risk, especially with it taking several days to get patches through the iOS App Store Review process. He thought back to his days working on websites and realized automation was the answer.
"Dan surveyed the existing landscape of tools, only to find that all of them hand major drawbacks. The tool supplied by Apple, UIAutomation, required tests to be written in JavaScript, and did not allow for real time debugging or interpretation. It also had to be executed inside the Xcode profiling tool, Instruments. Other 3rd-party tools used private APIs and required SDKs and HTTP Servers to be embedded into the application. This seemed highly undesirable.
"Unsatisfied with the existing options, Dan asked his manager for some additional time to see if he could find a better way. He spent 2 weeks poking and prodding around to see if there was a way to use approved Apple technologies to automate an iOS application. The first implementation he tried used AppleScript to send messages to Mac UI elements using the OS X accessibility APIs. This worked to some degree, but would never work on real devices, not to mention other drawbacks.
"So he thought, what if I could get the UIAutomation framework to run in real time like an interpreter? [ READ MORE ]
Jason Huggins, who created the first version of Selenium at Thoughtworks ,then teamed up with Simon Stewart at Google to make Selenium WebDriver, founded a company where if you were doing software test automation, you could use their devices-in-a-cloud to test on. That company was Sauce Labs.
Jason was inspired by Dan Cuellar's talk at Selenium Conference 2012, and talked Jason into making his code open-source. They dubbed the product Appium: Selenium for Apps. It was re-written based on the web server framework Node.js in 2013, and Appium 1.0 was released in 2014. Appium was donated to the non-profit JS Foundation late in 2016.
Dan still works with the Appium team. A few weeks ago he demoed Appium Desktop.
From Client/Server Architecture:
"Appium is at its heart a webserver that exposes a REST API. It receives connections from a client, listens for commands, executes those commands on a mobile device, and responds with an HTTP response representing the result of the command execution. The fact that we have a client/server architecture opens up a lot of possibilities: we can write our test code in any language that has a http client API, but it is easier to use one of the Appium client libraries. We can put the server on a different machine than our tests are running on. We can write test code and rely on a cloud service like Sauce Labs to receive and interpret the commands".
Session
"Automation is always performed in the context of a session. Clients initiate a session with a server in ways specific to each library, but they all end up sending a POST /session request to the server, with a JSON object called the 'desired capabilities’ object. At this point the server will start up the automation session and respond with a session ID which is used for sending further commands".
Desired Capabilities
"Desired capabilities are a set of keys and values (i.e., a map or hash) sent to the Appium server to tell the server what kind of automation session we’re interested in starting up. There are also various capabilities which can modify the behavior of the server during automation. For example, we might set the platformName capability to iOS to tell Appium that we want an iOS session, rather than an Android or Windows one. Or we might set the safariAllowPopups capability to true in order to ensure that, during a Safari automation session, we’re allowed to use JavaScript to open up new windows. See the capabilities doc for the complete list of capabilities available for Appium".
Appium Server
"Appium is a server written in Node.js".
Appium Clients
"There are client libraries (in Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript, and C#) which support Appium’s extensions to the WebDriver protocol. When using Appium, you want to use these client libraries instead of your regular WebDriver client. You can view the full list of libraries here".
"Appium is at its heart a webserver that exposes a REST API. It receives connections from a client, listens for commands, executes those commands on a mobile device, and responds with an HTTP response representing the result of the command execution. The fact that we have a client/server architecture opens up a lot of possibilities: we can write our test code in any language that has a http client API, but it is easier to use one of the Appium client libraries. We can put the server on a different machine than our tests are running on. We can write test code and rely on a cloud service like Sauce Labs to receive and interpret the commands".
Session
"Automation is always performed in the context of a session. Clients initiate a session with a server in ways specific to each library, but they all end up sending a POST /session request to the server, with a JSON object called the 'desired capabilities’ object. At this point the server will start up the automation session and respond with a session ID which is used for sending further commands".
Desired Capabilities
"Desired capabilities are a set of keys and values (i.e., a map or hash) sent to the Appium server to tell the server what kind of automation session we’re interested in starting up. There are also various capabilities which can modify the behavior of the server during automation. For example, we might set the platformName capability to iOS to tell Appium that we want an iOS session, rather than an Android or Windows one. Or we might set the safariAllowPopups capability to true in order to ensure that, during a Safari automation session, we’re allowed to use JavaScript to open up new windows. See the capabilities doc for the complete list of capabilities available for Appium".
Appium Server
"Appium is a server written in Node.js".
Appium Clients
"There are client libraries (in Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript, and C#) which support Appium’s extensions to the WebDriver protocol. When using Appium, you want to use these client libraries instead of your regular WebDriver client. You can view the full list of libraries here".
Do You Have Java 8?
For this project, you need to see if you have at least Java 8.
- Open the Mac Terminal and type: java -version
- If you have Java 7 or lower, go to the Java downloads page, select the Java Platform (Java Development Kit) to go to that section.
- Scroll down to the Java SE (Standard Edition) Development Kit, Accept the License Agreement, and choose the version for your operating system, such as the one for Mac OS X for my Macbook.
- Install Java using the defaults.
Appium Desktop
Appium Desktop is a web-based tool used to inspect an iOS or Android application. It an open source app for Mac, Windows, and Linux
Appium Desktop does not run mobile automation, itself. It uses the Appium server and iOS and Android emulators to run and inspect app, so that an automation developer can investigate various strategies to locate app elements such as text boxes, dropdown lists, etc. If you have a Sauce Labs account, or Test Object, you could substitute the emulators there.
It provides, according to the GitHub Site: https://github.com/appium/appium-desktop
- "A graphical interface for the Appium Server. You can set options, start/stop the server, see logs, etc... You also don't need to use Node/NPM to install Appium, as the Node runtime comes bundled with Appium Desktop".
- "An Inspector that you can use to look at your app's elements, get basic information about them, and perform basic interactions with them. This is useful as a way to learn about Appium or as a way to learn about your app so you can write tests for it".
You can read more in the documentation about:
- Advanced Settings
- Server Presets
- Start new sessions via Sauce Labs, Test Objects, or for custom servers.
Warning: Appium Desktop is Not Appium
"Appium Desktop is a graphical frontend to Appium with additional tools. Appium Desktop is released on its own cadence and has its own versioning system. If you are reporting an issue with Appium Desktop, always be sure to include both the version of Appium Desktop and the version of the Appium Server which is in use (see below).
"If you're on macOS, you will need to install Appium Desktop by copying the app from the downloaded DMG file to your own file system (the best place is the "Applications" folder). Running Appium from in side the attached DMG itself is not supported, and will not work".
How to Install Appium Desktop on the Mac
1) Find the latest Release on https://github.com/appium/appium-desktop/releases
2) Download the version written to your operating system, such as appium-desktop-1.0.0-beta.6.dmg
3) Double-click on the Disk Image (*.dmg) file to open it, and drag the "Appium" icon to the "Applications" folder.
4) Go into "Launchpad", search for "Appium", and double-click it. Select that, even though Appium is an application downloaded from the internet, that you want to "Open" it.
How to Start Appium Desktop
You can read more in the documentation about:
- Advanced Settings
- Server Presets
- Start new sessions via Sauce Labs, Test Objects, or for custom servers.
... for now, we are going to focus on getting an Android app up and running with Appium Desktop so we can start inspecting it.
After launching Appium Desktop, you will see the start window:
 |
| Behold, the Start Screen! |
"When you open Appium Desktop, you are greeted with the server start window. The basic option is to start an Appium server with all its defaults and the ability to modify the host and port. The start button will also let you know which version of the Appium server you are running, which can be useful when reporting issues to the Appium team". (From the GitHub site)
For our purposes, let's keep it simple, and select "Start Server v1.6.4-beta", leaving the host at "0.0.0.0" and the Port at "4723".
We then are presented with the server console output window.
In the next blog post, we will be going over:
- Adding Android emulators onto our system from the Android SDK (Software Development Kit)
- Setting up Desired Capabilities in Android Desktop
- Finding an app to test against
- Starting a news session with Appium Desktop.
Learning Appium
- Part One: What is Appium Server and How Do You Start It With Appium Desktop
- Part Two: How to Connect To Your Android Device Using the Android SDK, the Android Command Line Tools, and the Android Debug Bridge
- Part Three: Setting up remote devices through WiFi
- Part Four: Setting up Android Emulators with Android Virtual Device Manager (avd), choosing the Android operating system version
- Part Five: Find the Desired Capabilities: appPackage and appActivity. Bug in AAPT if giving just appName
- Part Six: Inspecting an Android app using Appium Desktop
... Until then, Happy Testing!
-T.J. Maher
Twitter | LinkedIn | GitHub
// Sr. QA Engineer, Software Engineer in Test, Software Tester since 1996.
// Contributing Writer for TechBeacon.
// "Looking to move away from manual QA? Follow Adventures in Automation on Facebook!"
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