Are you looking for a clear path to mobile testing greatness but not sure how to get there? Need some best practices or guidelines on how to make your Appium automation awesome? In this episode Jonathan Lipps, one of the key contributors to Appium, makes a BIG announcement and reveals a must-have Appium resource. Listen up and discover how to succeed with Appium Test Automation.

About Jonathan Lipps

Jonathan has been making things out of code as long as he can remember. Jonathan is the architect and project lead for Appium. Before founding Cloud Grey, he was Director of Open Source at Sauce Labs. He has worked as a programmer in tech startups for over a decade but is also passionate about academic discussions.

Jonathan has master’s degrees in philosophy and linguistics, from Stanford and Oxford respectively. Living in Vancouver, he’s an avid rock climber, yogi, musician, and writer on topics he considers vital, like the relationship of technology to what it means to be human. You can visit his personal site at jlipps.com.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• Appium has gotten popular enough that there are a lot of people out there who are trying to be successful with it that could use a little help. And I really saw this in my time at Sauce Labs. Sauce Labs as you know the most prominent service provider for Appium in the world and so we had all kinds of customers that were using Appium and then I started to see customers making the same kinds or mistakes or seeing that they could be helped along the way in terms of their Appium knowledge or understanding. So I really saw an opportunity to start my own consultancy Cloud Grey and just kind of try and see how it goes and we’ll see if the markets there like like I think it is. The other services are going to be pretty simple what you’d expect. So coming into companies that are wanting to get started with mobile testing and have identified Appium as the tool of choice because it makes sense for the way that their teams work and for their requirements. Coming in and giving a day or two workshop to help get all of their engineers on the same page in terms of their knowledge or Appium or coming in and helping them strategically figure out how to set up Appium as part of their C.I. pipeline or how to use leverage successfully.
  
• In most cases setting accessibility IDs on your elements to make them more accessible is actually good for making your app more accessible to as long as you choose accessibility labels that are sensible to human beings who are using them and that accessibility context.
  
• I definitely think there are pros and cons to using native vendor testing tools and Appium and I wouldn’t say that Appium is a cure all for your testing woes but I think the particular argument that you just expressed isn’t really valid in practice it makes sense and to a certain degree it’s why Appium itself relies on the tools at the vendors provide rather than writing our own kind of automation engine code. So Appium actually uses XCUItest under the hood and uses UI Automator to under the hood and there’s actually a driver for Appium that uses espresso under the hood and that’s in beta and people can go use that now.
  
• So if you’re using Appium in a way which really you know is inefficient as I said by over using Xpath or doing some of these other things yes it’s going to be slow because then Appium is having to do a lot of work to figure out how to do what she meant on the underlying automation engine and sometimes that can be very inefficient. In most cases where I’ve actually dug in when people have said Appian is slow. There is something that that can be fixed in terms of how they’re utilizing Appium.
  
• AppiumPro.com is a weekly newsletter that I’m starting. It’s going to start off as tips and tricks and things that I think people may not know how to do with Appium that are useful and then probably some things they’ll be different levels they’ll be a beginner and advanced tips something for everyone. I created it to help underscore this vision of all kinds of interesting things you can do. There will be code examples. If there’s anything cool going on the community I want to highlight that. So you’ve written a framework or a plugin or a driver of your own or have some interesting in the world of Appium I want to start pushing that out to the community and have it be a sort of a lightning rod of news and interesting methods and facts about Appium that people can subscribe to and just get in their inbox every week.
  
• Today the actionable advice that I recommend is go check out our new docs because we released completely redesigned and reorganized and updated docs so things are so much better than they were. You’ll find essentially an API reference for Appium which is something that we’ve never had. So every command that Appium supports it has which client libraries it’s available in which drivers it’s supported by code examples and all the rest and we’ve put a lot of work into this. So if you’ve gone to the Appium site before and been disappointed with the docs like I’ve been for a number of years go check it out again today — Appium.io.
  

Connect with Jonathan Lipps

• Twitter: @jlipps
• Appium Resource: Appium Pro
• Company: Cloud Grey

May I Ask You For a Favor?

Thanks again for listening to the show. If it has helped you in any way, shape or form, please share it using the social media buttons you see on the page.

Additionally, reviews for the podcast on iTunes are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show and I read each and every one of them.

Test Talks is sponsored by the fantastic folks at Sauce Labs. Try it for free today!