Mobile application ecosystems — let’s count Android and iOS here — are unbelievably dynamic, but they also suffer from both software and hardware fragmentation. This is especially true for Android, but fragmentation also exists in the iOS ecosystem, as experienced with the rollout of iOS 8. As the latest version of iOS was released, many existing apps were made clumsy on updated devices.
Even the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have had not-so-typical issues for Apple devices. In addition, a significant proportion of users with older devices have very few options: essentially, buy new hardware (i.e. a new device) to get everything working well.
In the Android world, things are different. As OEMs launch new devices, software updates and customizations for their devices, application and game developers get serious headaches trying to keep their latest products up to snuff and fully compatible with all possible device variants. Making a certain app or game work only on high-end devices is out of the question, though. Why would a developer want to miss out on a significant chunk of potential users?
Professional automated testing software is a solution to a common problem: how to produce high-quality, robust and reliable software with the ever-growing complexity of technology and under massive competitive pressure. Automated software testing is a cost-effective solution to this problem. Not to mention, it provides three business benefits:
- increased testing efficiency,
- increased testing effectiveness,
- faster time to market.
This article walks through a sample use case for test automation and provides a downloadable example to get you started. Also, we’ll focus on different aspects of mobile test automation and explain how this relatively new yet popular topic can help mobile app and game developers to build better, more robust products for consumers. With the advanced example later in the article, we’ll show how image recognition can be used to test mobile games; specifically, we’ll run Appium’s test automation framework against Supercell’s Clash of Clan game to illustrate how image recognition can be built into the test-automation process.