Test automation helps to greatly improve mobile software quality and this, in turn, accelerates the process of product testing, improves general performance, and helps to satisfy client needs.

Mobile test automation should be performed:

1. When an integrated application is being tested;
2. Working with test cases takes too much time;
3. Load testing is being performed;
4. There is a need to reduce the amount of testing.

QA engineers should ideally pass labor-intensive tests to modern utilities, not execute them by themselves, using unavailable testing types.

Today a field of automation testing services offers various programs that can be used for the development and testing of mobile products.

Further, we’ll analyze some examples of them.

UI Automator Software

https://developer.android.com/training/testing/ui-automator

It has been developed by the Google corporation and has first-class technical documentation.

This tool doesn’t need the implementation of its own software code into a product that is being tested and allows to use all modern functions of the Android operating system completely.

UI Automator software helps to find elements in an application that is being tested and shows element locators where the locator is a special line that identifies a selected UI element in a unique way.

By the way, the main purpose of this tool is to perform black-box testing.

Espresso Product

It’s a good tool and it’s, to some extent, simpler and clearer when comparing it with the above-mentioned UI Automator.

It’s because graphical Espresso can add methods to tests inside automated tests.

Of course, it’s better to use two and more tools than use only one software since UI Automator/Espresso belong to one library and technically complement each other.

The main feature of this software is that an application is launched only one time during one test.

And it’s a big advantage for automation processes.

Espresso directly interacts with software code and contains direct access to connected resources.

This allows a user to implement his/her own code into software: it will be really very convenient.

Selendroid/Robotium products

These programs have been developed by the Google corporation and are still relevant.

The most interesting thing is that they don’t ask to access source software code and can refer to a certain project.

Moreover, Selendroid and Robotium work on devices and some emulators.

Also, we’d like to mention that Selendroid actively uses the most popular programming languages whereas, in Robotium, all tests are developed on Java only.

Appium

https://github.com/appium/appium

This tool is used to automate mobile software testing and contains open-source code that, in turn, is a special web server developed on Node.js.

The main principle is that a user doesn’t need to constantly compile projects or processes to update test automation.

One more benefit lies in the possibility to use various modern programming languages and some frameworks.

Some benefits:

1. It’s based on the WebDriver protocol that helps to test various mobile websites;
2. It has good support of a community on GitHub;
3. It’s available on all platforms.

[highlight dark=”no”]We’d also like to mention that some specialists who have certain web testing skills will find it easier to automate software testing with Appium.[/highlight]

Conclusion

Before you start testing mobile software, you need to study and select the most suitable software that will be able to do all tasks.

Each software component analyzed above has either advantages or disadvantages.

Mobile software testing software develops rapidly, therefore it’s important to check a relevant documentation version and keep in touch with communities.