Python Appium tests on different Android versions

Problem: UI element identifiers are not consistent across mobile platforms. Mobile is eating the world. However mobile operating systems are not yet fully mature. For example, UI element identifiers change between versions of the same OS. They also look different across Android and iOS. This causes automation scripts to be brittle. We hit this problem recently. We were writing automation […]

Android unit testing: Android testing framework and Robolectric

Problem: There are not many good tutorials on Android unit testing Android applications are written in Java. So you probably think if you know JUnit, you can unit test Android applications. Surprise! JUnit is not sufficient for unit testing Android applications. Junit works when the code runs within a JVM. Android applications interact with the Android OS. So you need […]

NoClassDefFoundError: org/hamcrest/SelfDescribing

I hit the following issue while trying to run a JUnit test in Eclipse: initializationError The Failure Trace displayed a message stating java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/hamcrest/SelfDescribing I made sure that I had JUnit 4 and org.hamcrest.core along with the Java library in my project but still faced this issue. After analyzing quite a bit, I noticed that my JRE System Library also […]

Ways to identify UI elements in mobile apps

Problem: Many testers do not know how to identify UI elements in mobile apps. In this post, I explain about different ways to find UI elements in Android’s calculator app. I also show you examples of using Appium’s API with the different locator strategies. Why this post? Identifying UI elements is a key component of writing UI automation. Most testers […]

Appium tutorial: Execute Python tests on mobile devices

This Appium tutorial will show you how to run automated tests on a real physical device. We estimate skimming through this post will take you 10 minutes. We estimate working through this post, step by step, will take you about 90 minutes. In this post we will cover getting setup with Appium, interfacing with real devices, writing and running Appium […]

BrowserStack configuration for Selenium automation

BrowserStack has a number of useful configuration options. In this post, we will show you how to make your automated test runs to use specific configuration parameters of BrowserStack. We walk you through the steps needed to modify your existing automated test runs to use specific configuration parameters of BrowserStack. We assume you have a BrowserStack account. If not, please […]