2024-04-23
Mobile automation testing and visual testing
Many mobile QA teams are getting rid of manual testing. The need for automated testing is growing. Most teams focus test automation on Unit, API, Integration, and Functional UI.
Visual testing is an important aspect of mobile automation testing.
Visual UI Testing is critical to catching unintended visual bugs while updating UI components. Visual bugs are difficult to find using functional tests. Functional tests focus on identifying bugs in a workflow.
Automated visual testing tools like Applitools can help find visual bugs. Manual finding of visual bugs is difficult. Manual comparison of hundreds of images of a mobile app is painful.
Applitools visual regression testing
Applitools provides AI-powered visual regression testing of applications. Applitools allows cross-platform testing to identify visual bugs.
Applitools focuses on visual aspects of an app. Applitools plays a major role in exposing visual differences between baseline snapshots and current and future snapshots.
Applitools provides AI-powered end-to-end visual testing and monitoring. Applitools helps developers, test automation engineers, QA professionals, and DevOps teams automatically run visual tests at scale across every app, browser, OS, and screen size.
Applitools allows developers to verify UI element appearance in a page. Applitools verifies that each UI element appears in the right color, shape, position, and size. Applitools also verifies that each UI element does not overlap or hide other UI elements.
What are visual bugs?
Applitools visual AI finds visual differences, which are visual bugs, in mobile or web apps. Applitools finds those visual differences at a much-accelerated speed.
Examples of visual bugs:
- Text blocking buy button on Southwest Airlines website (Source: Applitools)
- box blocking shopping cart on ThredUp Website (Source: Applitools)
Fragmented Android Market
Due to fragmentation of the Android devices market, Android apps may visually behave differently on different devices. Visual testing becomes more critical for Android apps.
Time-to-market becomes an important factor for improving customer experience. QA teams face more pressure to run tests across a vast number of devices in the easiest way possible.
Testing mobile apps on physical devices is cumbersome, slow, and expensive to manage. Using device farms is cumbersome, slow, and expensive to manage. These factors deter scaling tests on as many devices as possible.
Applitools teamed up with Genymotion to make parallel visual testing far easier for QA engineers.
Genymotion SaaS is a powerful Android emulator on the cloud. Genymotion SaaS runs Appium tests. Genymotion SaaS reduces app time-to-market.
Genymotion SaaS uses flexible per-minute pricing. Engineers manage testing costs by scaling up or down the number of devices. Testers at any level can sign up and try the solution on-demand. Testers can try the solution without a contract.
Applitools and Genymotion SaaS
Teams decided to work together with Applitools. The collaboration aims to solve a common problem faced by users. Users need to test the visual portions of an app on all Android devices at the same time.
Engineers can parallelize visual UI tests using Applitools and Appium. Engineers can run those tests across all Android Genymotion SaaS virtual devices at once. Applitools and Appium help detect bugs as soon as possible.
QA engineers appreciate testing mobile applications on a large number of Android devices and screen sizes. Scaling with actual physical devices is hard.
Using Genymotion SaaS virtual devices speeds up parallel tests. The collaboration between Applitools and Genymotion SaaS enables faster visual comparison on more configurations. The collaboration also enables seeing previous builds.
This article shows steps to parallelize Appium tests for visual testing. This article shows running those tests across a number of Android devices on Genymotion SaaS.
Running Appium visual tests using Applitools on Genymotion SaaS
Step 1
Write Appium tests using the Applitools SDK for Appium. Use the Applitools SDK for taking screenshots for visual testing.
Use the udid capability in tests. The udid capability defines on which Genymotion device tests run.
For Genymotion devices, adb serial is known in advance. adb serial is localhost:XXXXX. XXXXX is a port number. The port number can be defined in advance (cf gmsaas below).
Step 2
Launch Genymotion SaaS devices via gmsaas command line.
Step 3
Run visual tests across Genymotion SaaS devices using Appium.
For in-depth information on setting up Applitools and Genymotion SaaS devices, and running those tests, read the step-by-step tutorial:
- https://github.com/applitools/applitools-genymotion-sample
Video tutorials:
- how to run Applitools visual tests using Genymotion devices
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXuMglfNEeo&list=PLkqF-NUszJY5aTOZ9Uj7KaR3j3_6RT5on
More about Genymotion and Applitools
Find out more about Genymotion. Sign up for a Genymotion SaaS account to get started free with $50 worth of credits now:
- https://cloud.geny.io?&utm_source=blogpost&utm_campaign=applitools
Find out more about Applitools. Read Applitools thoughts on using Genymotion, Appium & Applitools to test Android apps:
- http://applitools.com/blog/genymotion-appium-android?utm_term=genymotion&utm_source=web-referral&utm_medium=blog&utm_content=blog&utm_campaign=genymotion&utm_subgroup=
Request a demo:
- https://applitools.com/request-demo?utm_term=&utm_source=web-referral&utm_medium=blog&utm_content=request-a-demo&utm_campaign=genymotion&utm_subgroup=
Sign up for a free account:
- http://www.applitools.com/free?utm_term=&utm_source=web-referral&utm_medium=blog&utm_content=free-account&utm_campaign=genymotion&utm_subgroup=
View their Appium tutorial:
- https://applitools.com/tutorials/appium-native-java.html?utm_term=genymotion&utm_source=web-referral&utm_medium=blog&utm_content=blog&utm_campaign=genymotion&utm_subgroup=