Can you guess the total traffic that comes from mobile devices on the current web? No? Brace yourself, as you will be shocked to hear that it is over 55%! This shouldn’t actually be a shocking factor, as mobile devices have become the gateway for everything from social networking and entertainment to banking and education. In such a scenario, you will require advanced testing practices like Selenium mobile testing to verify the functioning of your apps on all these devices.
Although Selenium doesn’t natively support mobile testing, with the use of the right integrations and dependencies, you can easily achieve this goal. Not familiar with Selenium mobile testing? Don’t worry! We are here for you.
Our article will help you understand how to execute automated mobile testing with Selenium while discussing the appropriate tools, setup procedures, best practices, and effective implementation strategies.
Why Mobile Testing
Before we go into the details of the test execution process, we must have a clear conception about why should we invest our time and resources in mobile testing. To shed more light over this segment, we have mentioned some of the most important parameters that justify the execution of mobile testing:
- There are hundreds of mobile devices with different screen sizes and hardware capabilities that are available in the present market. To make things more complicated, thousands of new devices come to this market every year. So, it becomes almost impossible to generalize the mobile testing process.
- While working with mobile devices, you will see that these devices run primarily on two platforms, iOS and Android. Both of these platforms have their own development criteria and testing requirements.
- The mobile operating systems and applications receive frequent updates. These updates bring new features, remove obsolete ones, and also implement various crucial security patches.
- Finally, mobile devices have limited battery life and slower network connections compared to their desktop counterpart. Therefore, by properly testing the functioning of your application on these devices, you can understand how its performance degrades based on these factors.
Why Selenium Mobile Testing
Now that we have finished discussing the importance of mobile testing, we must understand why should we even bother about Selenium for executing mobile testing, as there are various dedicated frameworks easily available in the market. Let us now divert our attention to some of the major parameters that can easily answer this question:
- By integrating Selenium with dedicated mobile testing frameworks like Appium, you can extend the capabilities of the Selenium WebDriver for executing mobile automation.
- Selenium allows you to write the automation test scripts in any of your preferred programming languages. This means you do not have to go through a learning curve just to adopt one tool within your testing environment.
- With Selenium, you can also target multiple browsers like Safari, Chrome, and Microsoft Edge for performing mobile testing. This means that Selenium will act as a one stop alternative for implementing both cross-platform testing and cross-browser testing.
- In short, for implementing mobile web testing, you can directly use Selenium, but for native or hybrid mobile apps, have to use its integration with Appium.
Setting Up Mobile Testing Framework With Selenium
To assist the new developers and testers, we have mentioned all the steps that you must follow to set up your mobile testing framework with Selenium. You must be careful to follow these steps in the given order:
- The first step is to install node.js, as Appium is distributed through it. You can perform the installation process from the official website and then enter the following command line to implement it globally:
npm install -g appium
- If you want to verify your installation, you can perform it by entering the following command in the terminal window:
appium –v
- If you want to initiate the Appium server, you can enter the command “appium” in the terminal window. By default Appium starts on http://0.0.0.0:4723, with the freedom that you can easily customize these ports as per your requirements.
- You can also set up emulators and simulators using the Android Virtual Device Manager from the command line to create virtual devices with specific mobile operating system versions and hardware profiles. To execute this process for iOS devices, you can use XCode Simulator to run and test iOS apps. You can easily launch it from Xcode or the command line interface.
Here, we would like to clarify that although virtual devices can help you execute the test cases without relying on real devices, they will restrict testing capabilities when it comes to the physical parameters of your device. This means that with these devices, you cannot understand how your app functions when subjected to user errors, low battery, or a broken display.
In such cases, you will have to rely on real devices to properly understand the variation in performance based on these parameters. However, you must remember that it is a massively expensive process to set up and maintain a real device lab. It is also a hectic process as you will have to constantly update the devices based on all the new additions in the market.
Advanced Selenium Strategies for Mobile Testing
To further improve your efficiency while executing Selenium testing on mobile devices, we have mentioned some of the most advanced strategies that are curated based on the modern application requirements:
- Using Cloud Platforms
As we already mentioned earlier, virtual devices cannot provide the whole scenario of mobile testing, and real device testing is both resource-consuming and hectic. In such a scenario, the testers can consider using cloud platforms like Lambda tests as the most effective solution.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 3000+ Browser-OS combinations and 5000+ real devices. LambdaTest also allows you to integrate Selenium and Appium to run automated mobile website testing natively. The following code snippet will help you understand the workflow for this process:
Another major advantage of this platform is that it will automatically create a detailed test report with multiple media elements like videos and screenshots. The perspective of this inclusion is that you can easily find the faulty elements in the web application and implement the required tips to quickly roll out the application to your customers.
- Using The WebDriver Protocol For Mobile
Since a single mobile device can run multiple browsers, you can reuse much of your existing Selenium code for mobile website testing. To implement this process, you simply have to follow the steps that we’ve mentioned below:
- You should specify the capabilities like platformName, deviceName, and the browser that you’re currently targeting. For new developers, you must target all the common devices and softwares that are currently popular in the market.
- You can also use a remote WebDriver session, which can connect to Appium or a cloud-provided Selenium Grid. This approach will help you launch a mobile browser instead of its desktop counterpart.
For further reference, you can use the sample code snippet mentioned below to understand how a Java snippet for Android mobile web testing might look like:
- Testing Native And Hybrid Apps With Appium
If you’re working on native and hybrid mobile applications, your approach will differ from regular mobile web testing. This is because here, you are dealing with UI elements that exist within the native app’s user interface instead of standard HTML elements. Let us now understand two of the most important concepts that can help you execute these test cases with Appium and Selenium:
- The native context covers the world of standard platform-specific UI elements. This includes the “android.widget.*” classes on Android and “XCUIElementType*” classes on iOS.
- On the other hand, the WebView context, which is used for hybrid apps, will be embedded within the HTML content inside the mobile application. This will allow you to switch the WebDriver context to the web view and also use the same techniques that you use for conventional web testing.
Here, the advanced strategy involves switching between multiple contexts depending on your testing scenario. To shed more light over this segment, we have mentioned a sample code snippet that elaborates this step:
Best Practices For Selenium Mobile Testing
Below, we have mentioned some of the best practices that you must consider while executing Selenium mobile testing. These practices have been carefully designed to assist you to improve the quality and productivity of the entire testing environment:
- We suggest the testers to use real devices for testing critical features like camera, GPS, and push notifications. This approach will help you ensure that you’re capturing the genuine device behavior. In case you cannot get access to real devices, you can consider using cloud platforms like LambdaTest as we have already mentioned earlier.
- It is very important to write small independent tests which focus on specific features or screens. This approach will help you improve the debugging and maintenance experience with your application.
- It is a wise idea to use tools like Appium Inspector or open-source libraries like Serenity BDD for advanced reporting. All these inclusions will play a very important role in streamlining the element identification and also creating a robust reporting pipeline.
- You can use “adb logcat” for Android or Xcode logs for iOS to capture device or system logs. These log data will help in debugging the tricky issues which will occur at the operating system level.
- Finally, you must remember that mobile platforms change very easily and quickly. Therefore you must keep your SDKs and other software up to date to avoid any form of compatibility issues while executing the test cases.
The Bottom Line
Based on all the factors that we have put forward in this article, we can easily say that since Selenium has been the longstanding competitor in the segment of automated web app testing, it will also benefit you when it comes to mobile website testing. All the advanced strategies, best practices, and tools that we discussed in this article will help you create and maintain a robust mobile testing framework.
To improve your quality in the testing process, you must consider it as a continuous refinement step where you are maintaining the test architecture, keeping your dependencies current, and also strategizing around the device selection process. During this phase, you should also allocate enough resources to improve the security and scalability of the architecture.
Finally, you must create a holistic approach to mobile website testing that puts your company at the forefront of this competitive market providing the best experience to your customers and also rapidly improving the brand reputation.
Also Read: Mobile Website Testing Made Simple: Best Practices And Tools for Success
