Mobile Testing in the Xamarin Test Cloud

Mobile Testing in the Xamarin Test Cloud

Mobile UI testing requires the same power as web UI testing. Certainly we need the basics: identify on-screen elements, automate, and make assertions. But that’s not going to be enough for teams building apps under rapidly changing conditions; not with hundreds of new, evolving technology combinations.

So what are the new rules? Here’s what we need, right-out-of-the-box:

• Tests run in the cloud
• Results are communicated immediately
• Tests are written once and run on multiple target configurations
• Detail and summary reporting
• Easy integration into the software delivery pipeline
• Code-less tools for recording simple user interface actions and a robust code framework for everything else

In this series we’re going to use Xamarin tools to build and run tests, both locally and in the cloud. These will be a mix of videos and narrative, as needed. Here are few upcoming topics:

First is a video showing how to build, configure and run a UI test on a simple Android app. The demo uses Visual Studio with Xamarin.UITest framework, C# and NUnit.

Next is a video where we tangle with Java, Android and Visual Studio configuration issues: “unsupported major.minor version”, package isn’t found, tests not showing in the Test Explorer, device contention and other favorites.

Now that basic tests are running, we can use the REPL command line utility to actually prototype and generate C# tests. This blog will also include a video demo.

Finally, we can push our local tests up into the cloud. The Xamarin Test Cloud lets you run tests against a large number of devices, operating system versions, processors and memory configurations. All queued up in the cloud to run automatically.

If you have any questions or want to see a particular facet of Xamarin Test Cloud, please leave a comment.

Originally published at Falafel Software Blog.