Scalable and Collaborative UI Test Automation in Swift

Presented at Mobile Dev + Test 2016, San Diego, CA, 04/21/2016.
https://mobiledevtest.techwell.com/program/concurrent-sessions/scalable-and-collaborative-ios-ui-test-automation-swift

Write *good* UI automation for your iOS apps and get your devs + testers collaborating. And, hopefully, stop shipping so many bugs. :)

Transcript

1. Scalable and Collaborative UI Test Automation in Swift Jason Hagglund Staff Software Eng - Test, The Climate Corporation https://github.com/TheMetalCode Twitter - @jhagglund
2. Where are we going? • Why bother with UI test automation? • XCTest API and UI Elements • Identifying UI Elements (Storyboard and Programmatically) • Stop Relying on the Recorder and Automate Predictively • Write Better UI Automation Code with Screen Objects • Extras • Questions 2
3. Why bother with UI test automation? Because this talk would be really lame if UI tests weren’t important or useful.
4. It’s All About the Pyramid 4 http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TestPyramid.html
5. Why UI Test Automation Efforts Sometimes Fail if effortToMaintain > valueAdded { notWorthIt(); } 5
6. The iOS UI and the XCTest API Looking at the structure of what we’re testing and the code that gives us the access to the UI.
7. Our Toolbox for iOS UI Automation • XCode 7+ • XCTest (supports UI testing as of XCode 7, iOS 9+) • Swift 7
8. • On the web: http://masilotti.com/xctest- documentation/index.html • Build it locally: https://github. com/joemasilotti/XCTest-Documentation Regarding XCTest Documentation... 8
9. What is XCTest? 9 A build target that targets your application’s build target. Say that 10x fast.
10. Your XCTest Bread and Butter • XCUIApplication ◦ This class models the application itself and has two functions: launch and terminate. • XCUIElement ◦ This class models a UI element contained within the application. • XCUIElementQuery ◦ This class models a search for an element. 10
11. UI Test Recorder: An Exploration Tool 11
12. Identify UI Elements from the Storyboard The least painful way to uniquely tag our UI elements for automation purposes
13. 13 Identity Inspector and Accessibility Are Your Friends
14. Accessibility Identifier > Accessibility Label 14 • Lest we forget: the primary purpose of Accessibility- enabled elements is to allow your app to be used in accessibility mode on the device. • Accessibility Labels are what the end user would actually see/hear in order to interact with your app. • Accessibility Identifiers don’t leave a mark.
15. Accessibility Identifier > Accessibility Label
16. Identify UI Elements Programmatically Our first encounter with the power of Swift Protocols
17. About Those Pesky Dynamically Generated Elements... • Protocol (similar to an Interface in Java): a collection of properties, methods, etc., that encapsulate common behavior that you want otherwise unrelated classes to share. • UIKit elements conform to the UIAccessibilityIdentification protocol, which has exactly one contract requirement: accessibilityIdentifier. 17
18. Let’s ID Some Table Cells Programmatically 18
19. Stop Recording and Write Predictive UI Tests The recorder is an exploration tool, not a testing tool.
20. A Revelation from Morpheus 20
21. No Really, It’s This Easy (In Many Cases) var someButton = app.buttons[“accessibilityIdentifier”] “app” = instance of XCUIApplication “buttons” = just one of many XCUIElementTypeQueryProvider methods (hey look, another Protocol!) “accessibilityIdentifier” = the accessibility identifier you have configured for that element 21
22. Why This Matters • Kill more bugs faster! (enables TDD-like practices) • Plus, just looks cleaner. Remember that ugly recorder-generated code earlier? 22
23. Write Better UI Automation with Screen Objects Your tests are software. Code like it.
24. Which Would You Rather Maintain? 24
25. Which Would You Rather Maintain? 25
26. Morpheus Says Take Pride in Your Test Automation Code! 26
27. Loadable: All Screen Objects Can Tell if They’re allLoaded() 27
28. Encapsulate UI Element Identification 28
29. Encapsulate Actions 29
30. Encapsulate Complex Assertions 30
31. Behold! Clean, Easy-to-Write UI Tests! 31
32. Extras For more advanced test automation needs
33. Asynchronous Test Expectations • Doable, but kinda ugly. DRY and write methods that wait on elements once. • https://gist.github. com/kcharwood/0a57d7a207aba1d578da • http://masilotti.com/xctest-helpers/ 33
34. Code Coverage for UI Tests 34
35. Cucumber/Gherkin Goodness! • Yes, really, somebody is finally doing this! • Integrates with both KIF and XCTest • https://github.com/Ahmed-Ali/Cucumberish 35
36. Conclusion Some stuff I hope you took away from all this that will stick.
37. Scalable and Collaborative • Scalable: leverages the well-worn patterns and practices of object-oriented programming to make producing UI tests as easy and DRY as possible. • Collaborative: a first class citizen that lives in the application code and conforms to the same high-quality standards. • Devs + Testers can make awesome apps together 37
38. Email - hagglundized@gmail.com Twitter - @jhagglund Code - https://github.com/TheMetalCode/ios-ui-automation-demo Thank you! Any Questions?