Automated Testing Frameworks for iOS That Really Work
The threshold of iOS success is higher during recent time because of the proliferation of iOS devices. Every startup company does not find it financially sustainable to promote iOS devices with different HW specs and Operating System versions. Whereas they do not find the games manually and testing applications as an ideal option anymore for QA process due to its scalability issue and low efficiency.
While Comparing iOS with Android, most of the experts have found that iOS is best and closed operating system. Various open source automation test tools and frameworks can be used to conduct robust automated tests for your application. On the other hand, the cloud-based testing solution enables the testers and developers to verify application quality efficiently which makes the iOS testing tasks much easier for developers and testers.
What Exactly iOS Testing Framework is and How It Works?
In manual testing, all tests are performed manually by the people whereas automated testing completely relies on the code. The testing code has been written by a QA engineer which has to be processed for testing process in a special testing environment which is popularly known as the automation framework. These testing frameworks carry a bunch of rules within it that are very important to create test cases. Therefore it's not compulsory to follow all the rules of automation testing framework.
iOS automation testing frameworks hold various responsibilities such as defining the format to express expectations, developing a mechanism to hook into test executing, reporting results, and much more. For understanding the working of iOS testing frameworks let's go through the brief description. This deep knowledge regarding the testing frameworks might help to develop the application that can easily go through all the testing phase without facing and rejection or issue.
Appium
An Appium testing framework is cross-platform testing too which is compatible with Android, iOS, mobile web, and even hybrid applications. This platform is an open source platform, therefore, it allows the tester and developer to perform the tests on emulators, simulators, and even on real devices. Appium offers a range of benefits to the tester, they can easily reuse tests scenarios across the web and mobile channels. They can also choose any tool for testing their application, they can easily use web driven compatible language to write their test, like Objective-C, Java, JS, and many more which speed up their testing process.
XCTest
XCTest is one of the great iOS UI testing frameworks. The XCTest program for testing was introduced by the support of Apple, hence it can be easily integrated into the development environment for integrating the process of writing and running the tests. Apart from XCTest, the tester can also use the TDD workflow. This testing framework comes up with all the required changes of Xcode, therefore, you need the support of the developer to tackle with this framework, hence hire developers who have deep knowledge of all this testing framework and can also work with Swift and Objective-C.
Calabash
Calabash is an advanced testing tool that allows the developer to write and run tests for both iOS and Android applications. This testing tool uses Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) for testing purpose and it's a similar kind of development which is carried out when the code is written after the completion of the definition of the externalities applications. Cucumber for scenario description is used by Calabash with the help of Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). Calabash is very beneficial for the testers because it makes easier and clear for the tester to work with the data.
OCMock
OCMock objects are very crucial from the point of TDD because it helps the developer and tester to craft unit tests. this unit test involves complex objects that do not have much risk for complications of the instantiation of each and every object. These objects are best for carrying out the testing methods. It does not carry any of Xcode for the in-built support for testing. Hence OCMock came into the picture as it uses the special library that is supported by Objective-C. It also offers various benefits to the tester and also offers different methods to them to employ mock objects throughout their application. It provides an easy way to the tester to add mock objects to existing unit tests.
EarlGray
EarlGray is a system that is developed with the support of Google. The EarlGray testing framework is an open source system. It is one of the best tools for testing that comes with various synchronization features. One of the peculiarities of this iOS automation testing framework is that most of the actions (test) are performed on UI elements which take place only on visible elements.
Charles Proxy Debugger
Charles proxy debugger is an HTTP proxy debugger and one of the HTTP monitors which helps the testers to easily track everything that has been sent or received by any of the other servers. With the help of this tool, the tester can easily edit and intercept with all the data that they want to. It is one of the cross-platform tools that can easily work and handle all the different languages. To use it for iOS testing the tester has to make necessary changes and set it as per the preference of their device.
Wrapping Up
Everyone clearly knows that iOS application testing is quite different than Android app testing. The tester can use various testing tools such as Calabash, Appium, Charles Proxy Debugger to develop the test scripts for using it to test the application developed on the cross-platform. Each and every framework has its own pros and cons, therefore it's important for the tester to choose the one that is suitable for their project. Before choosing any of the frameworks to get a deep knowledge regarding it to gain more benefits from the same.