How do I test my iOS Apps - testing

My question maybe silly, but can anyone coach me?
Except doing some test(most likely white box testing) while coding, after the App was built, do we have some testing tools or special method for doing the test?
All I can imaging for now, is only manual testing the functionality of my App.
Thanks everyone.

Update: Added section 'Automated testing for iOS4'
As a professional tester my suggestion is that you should have a healthy mix of automated and manual testing. The Examples below are in .net but it should be easy to find a tool for whatever technique you are using.
AUTOMATED TESTING
Unit Testing
Use NUnit to test your classes, functions and interaction between them.
http://www.nunit.org/index.php
Automated Functional Testing
If it's possible you should automate a lot of the functional testing. Some frame works have functional testing built into them. Otherwise you have to use a tool for it. If you are developing web sites/applications you might want to look at Selenium.
http://www.peterkrantz.com/2005/selenium-for-aspnet/
Continuous Integration
Use CI to make sure all your automated tests run every time someone in your team makes a commit to the project.
http://martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html
Automated testing for iOS4
Automate the testing of your application by scripting touch events using the new UIAutomation Instrument.
Some links:
http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1646-how-to-use-uiautomation-to-create-iphone-ui-tests/
http://cocoawithlove.com/2008/11/automated-user-interface-testing-on.html
http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2010/07/03/working-with-uiautomation/
MANUAL TESTING
As much as I love automated testing it is, IMHO, not a substitute for manual testing. The main reason being that an automated can only do what it is told and only verify what it has been informed to view as pass/fail. A human can use it's intelligence to find faults and raise questions that appear while testing something else.
Exploratory Testing
ET is a very low cost and effective way to find defects in a project. It take advantage of the intelligence of a human being and a teaches the testers/developers more about the project than any other testing technique i know of. Doing an ET session aimed at every feature deployed in the test environment is not only an effective way to find problems fast, but also a good way to learn and fun!
http://www.satisfice.com/articles/et-article.pdf

Take a look at automated testing tools. Supports automated and manual testing/sending feedback from within the app with annotated screen shots

I suggest you take a look at the iPhoneUnitTests sample code posted by Apple on their developer site.

FoneMonkey is a free and open source functional testing automation tool available for download from Gorilla Logic.

There a number of emerging options for automated functional testing, including Appium, Calabash, Frank, and Zucchini.

Much of testing any application is about understanding what you are testing and areas that should be tested. Some of this comes with experience, but types of things to consider testing about would be:
Functionality
iOS Design Guidelines / UI
Gestures
Connectivity
Types of devices to test on
Audio
Data
Crash reporting
Analytics
There's a big list of areas to cover.

I recommend Kiwi, its used for Behavior Driven Development. By far my favorite testing framework, makes testing much more fun, and test much readable and clear.
https://github.com/allending/Kiwi

Related

Best Testing tool for testing ExtJs application that can be easily automated on a Continuous Integration server

I am new to the Testing Arena. I am working with a very heavy ExtJs application.
And I am looking for the best testing tool.
I came across a bunch of tools, but can't seem to make a decision.
1) Siesta 2) Jasmine 3) Riatest
I want to be able to deploy these tests easily on a CI server.
Siesta and Jasmine can both be used with PhantomJs to automate the tests, but which one is better and easy to use?
As long as I can generate various clicks correctly and capture output, I'm cool.
Any help is appreciated.
Our company is moving from a Java based client to an ExtJS web and mobile application. We use QTP/UFT for Java automation which is slow, buggy, expensive, and cannot get passed the DOM easily so I started investigating Siesta recently. It seems like a viable option in my book but I admit I haven't checked out the other applications.
The initial setup with Siesta took longer than expected but with its event recorder, it makes it a gratifying transition. The recorder still requires debugging. I'm in QA and know how to script using Python, Bash, etc but it's definitely a learning curve to transition from VBScript to ExtJs/Siesta JavaScript. They have an open source version and a free 45 day trial to check out.
I've read about HTML Robot and SmartBear. Here's a post on the Sencha forums that talks about different automation software. Sencha also plans to release some kind of automation involving SenchaCmd during SenchaCon 2015 this April 7 to 9.
You should take a tool which covers your needs and improve the software quality.
Jasmine is good for unit tests without much gui interaction, you should use this to test your domain logic (e.g. stores, models, ...). Jasmine can run on every environment, a simple server with nodejs runtime is enought.
For regression tests the choice is yours. What tool you are comfortable with? Choosing a tool is one part, using it is another. Riatest seems like a windows application, are you able to run this on your CI server?
Evaluate them with your dev team and then make a choice for the long run.

what is an automation test

Could someone explain what an automation test is and why I would use it. I read from the wiki page that a tester would create a automation script? What kind of scripting language can be used to do this?
Automation tests are carried out to check the behavior of an application against expected behavior. Normally used in regression testing where you validate that a newer version of the application doesn't hinder any of the previous version's features. These might also be carried along with manual testing.
Coming to the scripting language part, this might help you:- https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/19292/best-language-or-tool-for-automating-tedious-manual-tasks
In simple words, If you are doing regression test or testing same piece of code over and over you can automate that manual process. That's called automation testing.
You can use several different scripting languages to achieve this and it's depends on which tool you are using. Some popular automation tools are Selenium, QTP, Loadrunner, Jmeter, SOAP UI etc.
You want to check your login with more than 1000 of users how much time you will spend to run this test case ?
In the same way you want to test you mobile API's before it used by developer how will you test?
There are lots of thing for that you have to go for automation In small application, sites you can work as an tester after that when those app's sites will grow will large data than those product owner will move for automated test cases

Does anyone use Sikuli as a testing tool?

Hi I have a Swing application to test and I found Sikuli a nice tool to do it, but I am a little worried about the size of the community and if it's being continually developed and it's being used by other companies.
Do you use it?
For what?
Is it stable?
Is it the best tool for the job you needed?
I use it in my company, too.
It can be used quite easily for not too complex gui-tests.
Sikuli was not developed for the last year but development is now increasing again.
Questions in the Sikuli-FAQ section on launchpad are answered fast although the community is not that big.
In my company, Sikuli is used for gui testing which was previously done by human testers.
It saves some time but not everything is automatable with Sikuli, e.g. the OCR functionality is not dependable (but will be updated from tesseract 2.04 to 3 in the near future).
For my job it was the best tool because it is the only open source (=free) tool I found that provides screenshot based automation that can be integrated with other systems like CI-systems and is programmable with Java and Python which makes easy unit testing possible with JUnit or PyUnit.
Hope I could help.
Yes we use it in-house for testing. It is actively supported. I have reported bugs in Sikuli and have had tickets and workarounds suggested within days with the bugs fixed in the next revision.
It is quite stable. The problems I have encountered typically come from not specifying images correctly and the program selecting an incorrect area of the screen.
One of our more unique uses was creating a set of automated bench tests for a legacy embedded system. The system was written in assembly and had no unit testing capabilities. It communicated with a custom legacy PC application. Rather than try to locate the PC source code, reverse engineer the design, and then write some meaningful bench tests, we created a number of Sikuli scripts to interface with the PC app. It saved weeks of development.
Yes, we use it for automating GUI tests. It's used mostly for old systems that were developed with no test driven back end. (ie: no testing api)
We tests some very complex tools including a debugger using Sikuli.
We tend not to use the Sikuli IDE though.

End to end testing framework recommendations

I am in a new project that is looking to include an end to end testing framework.
We want something flexible, I've used Fitnesse before and I think we need something similar to it.
We are also using Hudson CI and are looking for something that would integrate easily with it.
Is there a clear winner?
UPDATED: The system has many components, some of them are web services running on tomcat, there are a couple of NoSQL databases too, but no UI testing is required for the moment.
Please add a comment if further clarification on the project details is needed.
The robot framework is a good keyword driven testing framework that we use for end to end integration testing.
http://code.google.com/p/robotframework/
There is a plugin for jenkins (a fork of hudson) that is very useful. It reportedly works with hudson as well.
Great to read you have decided start using Robot Framework. Its Hudson plugin already has recently got much better (trend charts, available from Hudson directly, ...) and moved to new place:
http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/Robot+Framework+Plugin
Can you be more specific, when you say, you want to have an end-to-end testing framework? What kind of application are you developing (standalone, web based, web service, ...)? What language do you program in?
I would also look for previous knowledge in your team or around your team (e.g. other teams). It might be sufficient, to use TestNG or JUnit (I have seen an old paper on UI testing using JUnit). Almost all test frameworks should be fine for Hudson, as long as they can be started in a headless/scripted mode and if they provide the results in a format that Hudson understands (in the worst case HTML is sufficent, though Hudson will only be able to display the pages). So if you have IBM Monitoring tools available, you might want to look at Rational Functional Tester or Rational Performance Tester.
FitNesse is a good tool for functional testing. The business contacts can create the test cases by themselfs (developers have to provide some connector code), which will create more visibility and removes some work from the test engineers. Drawback is, that you can't really do UI testing. If you need a open source plattform for UI, have a look at seam. Even though I like the OSS philosophi, you might need longer ramp up time (higher costs) and possibly more maintainace time for OSS (not true for all OSS). In any case, check how easy it is to get support for your framework. You might even consider paid support for your framework (regardless if open or closed source). Also don't forget, even though you can fix OSS source yourself, you might not have the expertise or time for fixing bugs or adding features.
So give us more info and we can give you better advices.
My experience with jBehave is very good. Recommend.
It's based on BDD - Behavior Driven Development.

Test Automation framework - Tools important?

I have been working on Test Automation from last few months and have been using the tool named "Testcomplete". But I have noticed that the tools do not matter a lot in the field of automation. Only thing you expect from an automation tool is the ability of the tool to spit out the recognition strings for the different controls used in the test application.
Apart from this, you will always have to build a automation framework which will serve your needs writing code.
So my question is, Is my thinking that automation tools do not matter a lot in the field of automation correct? In the sense, you can use any tools to get your automation running. Or Do the tools really matter? (Please ignore the costs factor of the tools). Also if I need to learn a new automation tool, then what do I concentrate on? Or how do I go about learing the tool? In short, what exactly does "learning a tool" mean?
My 3 best reasons for choosing which tool to use:
it works. This is important, not all tools work in all scenarios i.e. flash, silver light, adobe air, legacy apps with no automation support, etc.
whole team skills. This includes not only testers, but also developers. Test automation shouldn't be an isolated effort, developers should also collaborate on it. This is far easier when dev and test are using the same language/platform.
price. Doesn't have to be free (but it could), but of course its an important factor.
Personally we use the same test runner as the one for the unit tests. That along with extra third party automation pieces that do the plumbing for you.
Some additional thoughts on why the tool is important:
Community - What's the user community like? Are there a lot of user-generated resources out there to help?
Support - (if vendor) What's customer support like? Do they fix problems quickly? Is it easy to find solutions to common problems?
Extensibility - Often in test automation, you'll need to roll your own or code work-arounds, if the tool does not support a particular type of object in your application. How easy is it to extend the product? What programming language does the tool use? What kind of support do you get from the IDE?
An other piece of advice: sometimes you'll need wrapper classes around certain frameworks. We were using WatiN, which was really good at its time, but it lacked Chrome (it had a small percentage that time) support. The thing that killed WatiN for us was the lack of coping with new FireFox releases: FireFox 8 was out, and we had to run on our tests on FireFox 3.6...
Selenium was the solution, but it had a totally different logic and we already had more than a 1000 tests.
So we had to create a wrapper class around Selenium to "fake" it was WatiN. We had some issues, but we had to rewrite only some special cases... And not all tests.
The point is, sometimes, support for frameworks just cease to exist. But with an own framework focusing on what the test actually does instead of how it works would save you in this situation.
Variety of Test Automation Frameworks and Test Automation Tools are already available in the market. Thus, I would not recommend the built your own Test Automation Framework at all.
As far as selection of automation tools is a concern, I would say it does matter on the following basis:
Support: How much level of support you have when you are choosing an automation tool for your project.
Community: How big community is using that tool and how responsive that community is about sharing knowledge?
Pricing: (Proprietary or Open Source) Last but not the least is the pricing of the automation tool that you are planning to introduce in your project.
QA teams' expertise also matters sometimes. For example, in case your QA team does not have a developer or semi-developer skills vs Not-Technical QA Team, etc.
Regarding the Automation framework, there are many automation frameworks also available in the market already, therefore no need to reinvent the wheel. and selection of automation framework mostly depends on your selection of scripting language.
For example, if you choose python as your scripting language, then you have option to choose UnitTest, PyTest etc. as an automation framework.
In case of Java, you have option of JUnit and TestNG as an automation framework.
and so on, the base on your selection of scripting language.
Finally, when it comes to structuring your automation framework, it solely depends on many things as the following:
Your nature of the project
Single product vs multiple products
and many more...
Check an example of multiple product automation project directory structure. https://github.com/pancht/python-selenium-framework
I hope, in some way, I would have helped you out in giving an answer to your question.
Thanks,
Panchdev Singh Chauhan