If we quickly glance at the present market, almost 55% of the total Internet traffic is controlled by mobile users. The mobile market in itself is highly cluttered as it consists of various devices like smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and even IoT devices. So, the developers must implement advanced testing processes like Selenium mobile testing to provide compatibility on all these devices.
Selenium is one of the most used automation tools to initiate automated cross-platform mobile app testing. In this article, we will learn about advanced Selenium mobile testing techniques. We will also look at how a few efficient cross-platform testing strategies can help to ensure the robustness and quality of mobile applications.
Understanding the Importance of Cross-Platform Testing
For mobile apps to ensure consistent performance across various devices, operating systems, and screen sizes, cross-platform testing is essential. Smartphones, tablets, and wearable technology are just a few of the many devices that modern users can use for accessing mobile apps. The testers must also remember the differences in operating systems, such as Windows, iOS, and Android, on various mobile devices.
This is because each platform has unique characteristics that can affect the functionality and user experience of these apps. In a worst-case scenario, the app can crash completely after being deployed.
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Introducing Selenium for Mobile Testing
To introduce the new testers, we can say that Selenium is a well-known open-source automation framework that is mainly used for executing web app testing. However, with the inclusion of mobile automation frameworks like Appium, Selenium can be used for performing mobile testing in an efficient format.
This test suite is built on the WebDriver protocol and allows testers to automate mobile apps across different platforms using multiple Selenium WebDriver APIs. Let us now understand some of the major features of using Selenium for executing mobile app testing:
Selenium allows testing on various platforms, including Windows, Android, and iOS. This inclusion ensures the broad compatibility of all mobile apps.
With Selenium, the testers can access a comprehensive set of commands for interacting with multiple mobile elements. Some of the most commonly used interactions that are supported by Selenium include taps, swipes, and gestures.
The testers can seamlessly integrate Selenium with multiple popular testing frameworks like JUnit and TestNG. This integration allows efficient test case management and also test reporting. The testers can also use this integration to track the crucial bugs that might arise in the infrastructure of the mobile app.
Advanced Strategies for Cross-Platform Testing with Selenium
Let us now understand some of the most advanced strategies that the testers can use for initiating cross-platform testing with Selenium on mobile apps:
1. Selecting the Right Device and OS Combination
As we already mentioned earlier, there are hundreds of mobile devices and operating systems that are available in the market. So, it will become almost impossible for the app testers or the companies to extend the compatibility of their app on all of these combinations.
So, it is critically important for the app developing companies to survey the target audience and create a list of the right devices and operating system combinations. This process will not only help streamline the app development process but will also ensure optimal compatibility based on the audience requirements.
The app companies can also utilize cloud-based testing services such as LambdaTest to streamline the process. It is possible as this platform provides access to more than 3000 different combinations of real devices, browser versions, and operating systems. Using this process, the testers can ensure comprehensive coverage and also the inclusion of real world usage conditions.
LambdaTest also integrates advanced features like artificial intelligence and machine learning to further improve the efficiency of the test cases. While using this platform, the developers can also keep track of the test instances with real-time test activity logging. Finally, after executing the test instances, this platform will generate a comprehensive test report with multiple screenshots and videos for efficient debugging.
Additionally, LambdaTest offers capabilities like automated screenshot generation, real-time testing, and debugging tools, which let testers rapidly and effectively find and fix browser compatibility problems.
2. Implementing Page Object Models (POMs) for Mobile
The Page Object Model is a design pattern that is mostly used in Selenium automation for web apps. Using this pattern, the testers can promote code reusability, maintainability, and scalability by encapsulating the functionality of web pages into multiple separate classes.
For mobile testing, the testers can also adopt a similar approach by creating page objects for mobile screens or views. In this context, each page object will represent a mobile screen, and it will encapsulate the elements and actions related to that screen.
Using this abstraction, the testers can simplify the test maintenance process and also enhance the readability to make the test scripts more maintainable and robust. It is one of the most important factors to ensure the long-term viability of the test instances, as the developers will have to reuse huge segments of the existing test code for rolling out future updates.
3. Handling Mobile Gestures and Interactions
Since most modern mobile devices use touchscreen interactions, it will become a complex process for the developers to handle all these gestures, including swiping, pinching, tapping, and rotating. However, using Selenium, the testers can access the built-in support for handling these gestures through its Action API.
Using the Action API, testers can simulate various forms of user interactions accurately to ensure that the app responds correctly to various gestures across different platforms and mobile devices. We have mentioned the sample test code, which will elaborate on how to perform a swipe gesture using the Selenium code:
4. Parallel Test Execution for Faster Testing
Modern apps consist of thousands of different elements that require thorough testing. So, it will become a hectic and massively time-consuming process in case the testers want to complete this process individually. Instead, the testers can adopt advanced strategies like parallel testing to test multiple instances simultaneously.
Using this process, the app testers can also run the test instances on multiple testing configurations and devices at the same time. To perform this process, the testers can combine the Selenium Grid with a testing framework like TestNG.
The Selenium Grid works on the principle of a hub that is connected to several nodes. Here, each node represents the individual elements of the mobile apps. So, whenever the testers initiate a test instance, the system will automatically study the test data and allocate the test cases to the respective node to perform the test execution process.
5. Integrating CI/CD Pipelines
While executing mobile app testing with Selenium, the developers can consider the perspective of integrating Agile Methodologies like continuous integration and continuous deployment. This will ensure the tests are executed automatically with every code change to provide timely feedback to developers.
To perform this process, the testers can also use dedicated tools like Jenkins, Travis CI, or CircleCI to set up CI pipelines for executing the mobile test cases. To perform this process, the system will trigger automated test cases as part of the pipeline. After this process, the teams can detect and fix issues early, thereby improving the overall software quality and accelerating the production process.
Best Practices for Selenium Mobile Testing
Now that we have understood some of the strategies for executing mobile testing with Selenium, let us go through some of the best practices that can further improve the efficiency of the test instances so that the testers can utilize their full potential:
Creating the Test Plan
Since it will be a complex process to execute cross-platform testing on mobile apps, the app developing companies must create a comprehensive test plan before initiating the test cases. This plan will sketch out all the testing steps, tools to be implemented, and other important dependencies.
Using the testing plan, the app developing companies can not only avoid any unwanted surprises but also ensure that every member involved in the company has a basic understanding of the current status of the app development project. The test plan would also serve as a point of reference for any issues encountered during the test cycle.
Understanding the Testing Balance
Although automation testing is highly efficient compared to manual testing, app developers and testers must understand it is almost impossible to automate all the test instances. This is because there are certain test instances, like exploratory testing and visual consistency testing, which rely on the expertise and experience of a human developer.
Therefore, the most perfect approach in this regard is to create the perfect balance between automated test instances and manual testing. As a starting step, the developers must only automate those test cases that do not require unique data inputs and are repetitive in nature.
Maintaining Data Security
While working with mobile apps, especially banking apps and shopping apps, the developers must remember that these applications will store a lot of sensitive user information, including transaction credentials. So, it is important to focus on the app security. For instance, the app testers must download all the testing dependencies from official websites.
Practices like these are crucial for ensuring the security of the app’s source code infrastructure and preventing any possibilities of malicious attacks or data leaks. It is also important to regularly review the app’s security to ensure that it is strong enough to prevent all the new possible threats.
Creating a Thorough Documentation
Finally, the app testers and developers must maintain a thorough testing documentation that will keep track of all the testing processes, bugs, and errors detected and the possible fixes implemented. Using this documentation, the developers can ensure that they avoid previously known errors in future iterations of the app.
This process also helps ensure that it is a smooth process to rule out future application updates. This is an important practice because modern mobile apps go through frequent changes to add or remove features.
The Final Verdict
By relying on all the data we discussed in this article, we can conclude that cross-platform testing is crucial for ensuring the reliability and quality of modern mobile apps across different operating systems and devices. Using Selenium will be a crucial choice due to its robust features and capabilities. It also plays a crucial role in automating mobile test instances.
So, by adopting all the advanced strategies that we discussed in this article, the testers can streamline the entire mobile testing process and also deliver high-quality apps which meet the evolving requirements and needs of the target audience.
With mobile apps continuing to evolve, it becomes increasingly important for testers to incorporate advanced Selenium mobile testing strategies, as they are essential for organizations to stay competitive in this rapidly changing digital landscape.
