How To Write A Test Script With Selenium WebDriver And Appium Libraries

Struggling to automate your mobile test cases? If we had to guess, you are still stuck with traditional practices where you use only one automation framework. The alternative? We recommend you to initiate Selenium mobile testing by integrating the Selenium WebDriver with Appium libraries. This process will help you not only automate the test cases but also add various advanced processes like cross-browser testing and cross-platform testing.

Not familiar with Selenium mobile testing? Don’t worry! We are here for you. Our article will help you understand everything you need to know to set up this testing environment and write your first automation test script. We will also help you go through some of the best practices that will play a very important role in improving the overall efficiency of this implementation.

What Is Automation Testing

Are you a new tester who does not know what is automation testing? It is an advanced process that helps to eliminate the time-consuming nature and error-prone infrastructure of manual testing. In this approach, you can run multiple repetitive test cases like regression testing automatically without any human tester involvement.

Automation testing also has a very important role in improving the efficiency of continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. Still not sure about the major role of automation testing? Let us now divert our attention towards some of the major factors that justify the inclusion of test automation:

• With automation testing, you can perform all the testing steps very precisely every time they are executed. So, they have a very important role in not only eliminating the human involvement but also improving the reliability of the overall infrastructure.

• There are certain tests that will take several hours to execute if you only rely on human expertise. But with automation testing, you can wrap these tests within just a few minutes.

• Once you create an automation test script, you can reuse multiple components of it in future test cases. Therefore it helps improve the delivery timelines by implementing reusability.

• Finally, although automation testing comes with an initial steep investment, it helps save a lot of revenue in the long run by eliminating the expense of setting up and maintaining a comprehensive human testing team.

Why Selenium And Appium

If you are an experienced automation tester, you already know that there are various frameworks and test suites that are easily available in the market to initiate these steps. Now in such a scenario, you might have a question that why did we choose Selenium and Appium out of these options. To justify our choice, let us go through the following features of these frameworks:

• Both Selenium and Appium are open source which means you do not have to invest in licensing costs or any form of revenue investment. Moreover they also have a huge community of developers and testers who will help you whenever you are stuck with any feature of these frameworks.

• Both Selenium and Appium support cross-browser testing so that you can run the same test case on multiple browsers and further expand the compatibility of your application.

• Have a favorite programming language? We have a good news for you! Selenium and Appium will not lock you down with their proprietary programming languages and allow you to use any of your chosen languages to create the automation test scripts.

• Due to the huge community of these frameworks that we already discussed earlier, you will have access to multiple tutorials, forums, and libraries to achieve various customized testing goals that you might be looking for.

Setting Up Your Development Environment

Excited about executing Selenium mobile testing? To help you implement this process, you have mentioned all the prerequisites and the required steps in the correct order that you need to follow:

Prerequisites

Before straight away jumping into the test execution process, you must ensure the following softwares and setups are already present on your testing machine:

• The latest version of the Java development kit and the Java programming language, pur reference language, must be present within the testing environment.

• It is also important to have a built automation tool like Maven or Gradle. This will help you manage the dependencies for both Selenium and Appium.

• You should also have a development environment like IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse, which will help you to write and run the automation test scripts on both these tools.

• To run the Selenium WebDriver, you have to add all the relevant Selenium dependencies to your chosen IDE.

• The final prerequisite is to download all the relevant WebDrivers for the target browsers. For example, if you want to run the test cases on Google Chrome, you have to download the Selenium ChromeDriver.

To understand the process of integrating all the dependencies and test configuration, we can consider the example of the following sample code:

In the above code you must remember to replace the Java version with the latest version that you have installed in your system. If you’re running the test cases on browsers, you have to download the appropriate drivers from the official website and either place them in the system PATH or specify the path where they can be accessed by the system during the test execution process.

Creating Your First Test Script With Selenium WebDriver

Now that you have set up your test environment for executing the test cases with Selenium WebDriver and Appium library, you are all set to create your first automation test script using these dependencies.

To help you understand the test creation process, we are using the example of the following sample code for a better explanation:

To execute the above code, you have to run it as a Java application. After you begin the execution process, you will see the web browser open, load the website, print the title within the console, and then close the entire window.

Although we use the above code for the understanding process, you must remember that in an actual testing scenario, just printing the title will not be enough. Instead, you have to assert that the title or some other element is what you expected. Using a framework like TestNG or JUnit to perform the assertion process? Use the following sample code for the implementation process:

In the real world, you will have to use locators like ID, name, class name, and tag name to find and interact with various elements like clicking buttons and filling forms. The following sample code will help you understand how you can use these locators to click a button and fill out a form on your web application:

After triggering an action, we just have to wait for new elements to appear and use the assertions to validate that the next page is loading perfectly fine and then confirm that the required text is present on the website.

Best Practices For Mobile-Friendly Testing

Finally, let us go through some of the best practices for mobile-friendly test that have the potential to highly elevate your testing practices. This is because with these inclusions, you will not only be improving the efficiency of the testing environment but will also have an impact on the quality of the application that you’re currently working on:

Use Page Object Model For Mobile

Similar to web testing, you should also structure your Appium test cases using a page object model-like structure. This means that you must have separate classes for each activity or screen. And, there should be separate methods that can interact with each element on that screen.

Reuse Code From Selenium

Are you working on a hybrid mobile app or a mobile web app? Then, you must know that a huge section of the existing test code can be easily adapted to other test cases as well. For example, you can centralize the common logic, like authentication flows, to ensure that you’re not implementing duplication within your test environment.

Parallel Testing

By this time, you have already realized that there are thousands of different test cases that you must conduct to ensure the proper functioning of all the elements present on your mobile application. To tackle this hassle, we would suggest you to implement parallel testing so that you can run multiple test scenarios on different configurations at the same time.

While you’re using Selenium WebDriver, you can have access to Selenium Grid which is another component of the Selenium test suite that will assist you with this process.

CI/CD Integration

We recommend the testers to integrate the app test cases with Jenkins, GitLab CI, or any other DevOps tools. This integration will help you achieve quick feedback after every code commit. It will also be a very important part of ensuring that you’re conducting the development and testing processes at the same time.

Cloud Device Farms

Many testers often create a mobile-friendly test and run it only on a simulation or emulation softwares. It is a very bad practice as these software can never replicate the physical parameters of a device and how your application can react according to it.

As an alternative, we would suggest you to use cloud-based testing platforms like LambdaTest that provide a huge device farm along with multiple browsers and operating systems to run the test cases.

To improve our understanding about the influence of cloud device farms, let us use the example of LambdaTest as our reference point:

LambdaTest is an AI-native test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 10,000+ real devices, 3000+ browsers and OS combinations.

The Bottom Line

Based on all the areas that we covered in this article, we can easily say that Selenium WebDriver and Appium will be very important to automate your tests on both web and mobile platforms. By using the capabilities of these tools, you can speed up your testing cycle, reduce manual effort, and also ensure that your application is thoroughly tested on all your target devices and configurations.

Moreover, if you implement all the best practices that we have outlined in this article, you can ensure that you are achieving the full potential of your testing environment. Factors like these will be very important to not only create a positive brand reputation but also constantly expand your target audience.

Want one final advice? Start integrating advanced practices like artificial intelligence algorithms and machine learning technologies within your test environment. Along with that, look out for all the other upcoming trends so that you can provide the best experience to your customers.