Comprehensive Guide To Mobile Testing With Selenium

Are you struggling to set up Selenium mobile testing within your application testing environment? This blog will guide you through the complexities of mobile testing while using Selenium. We will also cover everything starting from the setup process all the way to advanced testing strategies.

As testers, we all can agree that mobile testing is a very important part of ensuring the quality and performance of modern applications. With the variety in the smartphone industry, it becomes very important to ensure that these applications work in the same format across all devices and platforms.

Selenium is one of the most powerful and commonly used automation tools. The testers can also use Selenium to implement mobile automation testing. This tool will also provide access to various unique features that will be crucial for implementing high-quality application development and deployment cycles.

Understanding Mobile Testing

Before we proceed towards executing mobile testing with Selenium, it is very important to develop a basic idea about the influence of modern mobile test cases. In simple terms, it is the process of verifying that a mobile app functions as expected across multiple devices and operating systems.

Mobile testing also consists of multiple testing types, including performance, functional, usability, security, and compatibility testing. The final goal of implementing mobile testing is to deliver a high-quality and robust application to elevate the customer experience across multiple mobile devices.

Reasons To Use Selenium Mobile Testing

As we already mentioned earlier, Selenium is a widely popular open-source tool for automating modern web browsers. At its core, it is a test suite that consists of various dedicated tools to assist the testers at different stages of the application testing cycle.

The testers can combine Selenium with Appium to transform it into a very powerful tool for implementing mobile automation testing. Let us also focus our attention on some of the major reasons that further justify using Selenium for implementing mobile application testing:

• Selenium natively supports multiple operating systems and browsers. Moreover, by integrating Appium, the testers can extend this compatibility to mobile platforms like Android and iOS.
• Since both Selenium and Appium are open-source, the application developers can use the features of both these frameworks without worrying about any investments. This is a very economical way and is especially beneficial for small startup companies or individual developers.
• Both Selenium and Appium have a dedicated community and tester ecosystem to provide ample resources, libraries, and support mechanisms to help the new developers and testers transition smoothly.
• While using Selenium and Appium, the application testers can integrate continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines to further improve the capabilities of automation testing while working on mobile applications.

Setting Up The Mobile App Testing Environment

To set up the mobile application testing environment, the application developers and testers have to follow a series of simple steps. To further simplify this entire process, we have broken up the process into several smaller segments and steps:

Prerequisites

Before proceeding with the test setup process, the application developers have to ensure that they have the following software installed on their testing system:

• The latest version of the Java Development Kit is downloaded and installed.
• You have the latest version of node.JS present on your testing system.
• You must download Android SDK to implement Android testing in case you are working on native Android applications.
• To verify the functioning of iOS applications on the Mac operating system, you need to download Xcode on your system.

Installing Selenium

The first step in setting up the mobile testing environment involves downloading and installing the Selenium WebDriver. To perform this process, the testers have to install the following Maven dependency in the “pom.XML” file in case you are using maven for the installation process.

Another alternative to this process is to download the Selenium stand-alone server from the official website and then perform the installation process.

Installing Appium

Now, the application testers have to install npm on their testing system using node.JS. The testers can easily perform this process by entering the following code snippet in the terminal window:

Setting Up The Mobile Devices

Now the developers have to follow the following steps to set up the target mobile devices for executing the test cases while using Selenium. In case you are primarily targeting Android devices, you must follow these steps:

1. First, you have to enable the developer options on Android devices by navigating to the settings option.
2. After this you have to enable USB debugging so that you can connect your device to the testing machines using a USB cable.
3. Finally, you have to connect the device to the computer USB and start sharing the device environment on your testing machines.To target the iOS devices for implementing mobile app testing, the application testers have to follow the given steps:

1. Here, the first step involves enabling the developer mode on your device by navigating to the settings of the iOS device.
2. After this, you have to connect the device to the MacOS machine so that you can start implementing the test cases.

Writing The Mobile Test Script

Now that you have set up the test environment for executing the test cases with Selenium, you can start writing the mobile test scripts, which will be responsible for executing the automated test suites. However, before writing the test scripts, you must have a clear understanding of the desired capabilities.

Here, the term desired capabilities mean a set of key value pairs which will tell the Appium server what kind of session to start. You can use the following code snippet to implement desired capabilities while testing Android applications:

In case you want to implement desired capabilities while working on iOS apps, you have to enter the following code snippet instead:

Launching The App

After you have created the test scripts and also specified the desert capabilities, you have to enter the following code snippet, which will allow you to launch the app using Selenium and Appium:

Interacting With Elements

As we all know that, in most smartphones, the primary mode of interaction is touch-based controls. So, you must be able to interact with the elements present on your application to ensure proper interactions in real-world scenarios. The following code snippet will allow the testers to click a button while verifying the performance of mobile web apps with Selenium:

Advanced Techniques for Mobile Testing With Selenium

Let us now go through some of the advanced techniques that the developers and testers can adopt to further improve the efficiency and potential of the Selenium mobile test suites:

●       Testing on Real Devices

Although emulators are convenient for the initial test cases, they fail to replicate the physical parameters of a device, which may lead to flaky test results. So, we encourage the testers to implement real device testing so that they can understand the performance of the app when subjected to real-world parameters.

It is also a good choice to integrate cloud-based platforms like LambdaTest, which can execute the test suites on more than 3000 different combinations of real devices, operating systems, and browsers. LambdaTest, a robust mobile site tester, provides access to this device farm through remote servers, which eliminates the expenses of maintaining an onsite device lab.

The AI-orchestrated test infrastructure of LambdaTest further helps testers implement efficient test data management and execution. This platform also allows testers to integrate various other unique features like comprehensive test reporting, live test activity logging, and parallel testing.

●       Parallel Testing

We advise the testers to implement parallel testing to massively reduce the time required for executing the test suites. Various tools like Selenium Grid can provide native support to run the test cases in a parallel configuration across multiple devices and platforms.

●       Handling Gestures

Mobile applications often heavily rely on gestures to accept various forms of user interactions. So, while using Appium, the testers will have access to automate the gestures including tap, swipe, and pinch. We have mentioned a sample code snippet that demonstrates performing swipe gesture testing while using Appium:

●       Performance Testing

By implementing performance testing, the application testers can ensure the application performs well under various usage conditions. In this regard, we would advise the testers to integrate Appium with tools like JMeter. This integration allows the testers to simulate various network conditions and loads for analyzing the impact of unstable network parameters on the app’s functioning.

Best Practices for Mobile Testing With Selenium

Now that we have understood everything about setting up and executing the test suites with Selenium let us go through some of the best practices that will further help the testers to streamline their testing efforts:

• We advise the testers to develop a very clear idea about the target audience before proceeding with the test suites. This will help them to pinpoint the most popular devices in this segment and focus their testing efforts towards these devices.
• It is important to focus on automating the critical test cases so that at least the basic structure of the application is functional at all instances.
• We also advise the testers to adopt a modular approach, which involves breaking down the test cases into smaller reusable models. This approach not only simplifies this testing process but also eliminates the risks of crucial errors.
• We would advise the testers to adopt data-driven testing which will help them to test various scenarios with different data inputs. This approach also helps improve the overall maintainability of the test suites.
• We advise the testers to maintain a proper balance between automation testing and manual testing while implementing mobile app test cases. This balance will help them to optimize their testing efforts while maintaining the high-quality of the final application.
• Finally, the tests must maintain a thorough test documentation consisting of all the required parameters, including test execution results and logged errors.

The Bottom Line

Based on all the factors that we analyzed in this article, we can safely conclude that mobile testing with Selenium and Appium will provide a powerful solution for automating modern mobile apps. Following all the steps that we mentioned in this guide, you can set up a robust mobile testing environment, write effective test scripts, and also adopt the best practices for ensuring quality and performance.

Finally, we would like to advise the testers that with the evolution of the modern mobile landscape, you must stay updated with the latest tools and techniques to implement successful mobile testing in the coming years. This implementation is also important to constantly expand your target audience while maintaining a positive brand reputation.