In this blog, we will discuss “Top 5 Frameworks for Mobile App Testing”. Smartphones have undoubtedly changed our lives.
In this era of mobile application development, every mobile app developer is looking for amazing tools that help in developing a robust and powerful application. We all know that mobile applications have simplified our lives and helping us in our day-to-day activities.
With the help of these powerful and smart apps, a person can do anything such as book movie tickets, watch online videos, play games, online transactions, etc. All these activities can be performed only when the mobile apps work smoothly. To offer smart functionalities and a better user experience, mobile app developers have to look for new technologies and tools to achieve this performance.
Many top mobile application developers are able to develop amazing mobile applications but, due to limited functionalities offered by mobile browsers, they are not able to test the mobile app, to check whether it is working properly or not.
Testing is a crucial part of the mobile application development process.
It makes these applications run smoothly and function properly on smartphones.
Testing allows a developer to check and view source codes, review the applications from several aspects such as user experience, functionality, user-interface, social network integration, etc.
Hence, here I have compiled a list of frameworks that help in mobile app testing:
Appium:
Appium is an open-source cross-platform test automation framework for iOS and Android mobile applications.
Being a cross-platform framework, it allows testing of native, hybrid, and cross-platform mobile applications.
It allows testers to write tests against several mobile platforms while using the same application programming interface (API).
With Appium, a user would be able to use test practices, frameworks, and tools required for the testing of the mobile application. The codes can be re-used by the developers between iOS and Android test suites.
It includes several client libraries such as Python, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, C#.
Espresso:
Espresso is an open-source mobile testing automation framework offered by Google for the testing of Android applications.
It allows Android mobile application developers and testers to bring the best out of the mobile apps for Google Play Store. Espresso offers a small and easy-to-learn API that is developed on top of the Android instrumentation framework.
It allows the testers to write reliable Android UI and it supports API level 8 (Froyo), 10 (Gingerbread), 15 (Ice-Cream Sandwich), and all the later versions. It can be synchronized with the Android UI thread and does not support web views for mobile apps.
Robotium:
Robotium is again Google’s open-source mobile app testing framework for native and hybrid Android applications.
It has powerful and easy-to-write automatic black-box UI tests, where a user would be able to write test cases around functions and user acceptance test scenarios when handling several other Android activities.
With just .apk, a tester can write test codes for the Android mobile applications. Robotium features run-time binding to user-interface (UI) components. It provides efficient test case execution. It also provides easy integration with Maven, Gradle and ANT.
Appcelerator:
Appcelerator is an open-source Software Development Kit (SDK), which is also known as Titanium for cross-platform mobile app development.
Along with the SDK, Appcelerator also offers Titanium-Jasmine as a mobile app testing framework. It allows a user to translate JavaScript into native codes.
The Titanium-Jasmine allows a user to test iOS and Android applications; whereas Titanium is a JavaScript-based SDK that offers more than 5k APIs for Android, Windows, iOS, Blackberry, and HTML5.
Calabash:
Calabash is a cross-platform mobile app testing framework. It is one of the popular automation testing frameworks which is used to test the functionality of iOS and Android native and hybrid applications.
It allows automated acceptance and easy-to-understand syntax that enables a user to create and execute automated acceptance tests for iOS and Android mobile apps.
Calabash offers another software, Cucumber, to the user to write automated acceptance tests. Later on, these written tests can be converted into to Robotium or Frank in run-time. Cucumber operates in a behavior-driven development (BDD) style.
Calabash offers support for about 80 different languages commands and new commands can also be implemented in Ruby or Java.
Conclusion: With all the above mentioned mobile app testing frameworks, android app developers can implement even the farthest scope of innovation and development.
Test case developers can take help of these tools and apply several methods to determine whether the application is ready to deploy or not.
Related blog – Tips before developing mobile application
