iOS Testing with Appium at Gilt

Talk given at the Appium Roadshow. Projective Space, New York.

Transcript

1. iOS Testing with Appium Details learned the hard way
2. What is Gilt?
3. Luxe brands up to 60% off
4. Inventory Changes Daily Sales are available for a limited time.
5. Sales start at noon ET. New sales start daily at 12pm, with bonus sales at 9pm.
6. Gilt Mobile Covers apps + mobile infrastructure. Team of 12 (And counting). QA Team offsite.
7. iPhone • iPad • Android
8. Previously form Gilt Mobile Test benefits need to be balanced with effort. UI Tests offer the most benefit to QA. Increased revenue → Quality focus. Really hard to change established practices.
9. What are we automating? Full sanity - Can customers login in and buy stuff? iPhone only. For now.
10. Run daily at 19:15 EST… Tests take a long time. Can conflict with customers.
11. …On Production Infrastructure is quite complex. Infrastructure is constantly evolving. Impractical to mock.
12. Why Appium? We’ve already built Selenium infrastructure. We already have Selenium skills.
13. All part of the Philosophy! No SDK to compile in. Strong open source community. Cross-platform support.
14. No libs? What is this sorcery? Appium serves as a webdriver proxy for UIAutomation. Part of instruments.
15. Accessibility makes it work UIAutomation drives apps via iOS Accessibility. Elements located by accessibility labels.
16. Where do we start? We already have the Selenium fundamentals. We’re already mostly accessible. Lets build some page objects.
17. Convention on top of Actions and Locators. Page validated during construction. Actions return new page objects. What are Page Objects?
18. When to wait? - Page object construction. Page objects represent state. Actions → State transitions Solves some reliability issues
19. Sore points. Accessibility. Overlays and pass-throughs. Partially obscured controls. Execution time.
21. About that Accessibility thing You’re probably not accessible enough. Container views hide their contents!
22. Accessibility isn't overhead Good for your users and your tests. UIAccessibilityIdentifier is for tests. Implementing UIAccessibilityContainer helps.
23. That’s a lot of work Accessibility feels like overhead. Rich Views → Complex Page Objects
24. But wait! There’s more work! We still need to write the actual tests. Page Objects might require some debugging.
25. Debug Page Objects? Test code needs tests?
26. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ Too. Much. Work.
27. Issue amplified by culture No problem in enterprise. Mobile seems to be different.
28. – NSHipster “Objective-C developers have, for the most part, remained relatively apathetic to Unit Testing.”
29. Issue amplified by culture App features take priority. Testing delegated to QA. QA is doing a great job!
30. Artists don’t Test! They might if it doesn’t get in the way.
31. The hardest part Getting the team involved.
32. Not knocking the team People are busy. They understand the benefits of testing. Benefits need to be balanced with effort.
33. The Takeaway The overhead involved is a developer deterrent. Appium tests are not yet integral to our process. But Appium is only getting better.
34. Buy some cool stuff!! Preferably on mobile.
35. Give us a visit tech.gilt.com @gilttech
36. Thanks! Matt Isaacs @haveahennessy