[QA] Report on "Appium via Sauce Labs" webinar

[Jeff Hall]

Earlier this month I attended a webinar sponsored by Sauce Labs on using 
Appium[1] to test mobile apps.  Appium has been getting a lot of buzz 
since it's open source, makes use of the Selenium WebDriver, and runs 
under node.js.

I wouldn't recommend watching the hour-long webinar archive (or even 
viewing the slides), since the presentation was somewhat rambling and 
not especially well-organized.  The primary speaker was a dev engineer 
from Gilt[2], and he focused on testing their native Android and iOS apps.

Here are my notes on a few points made by the speaker that I think are 
relevant to the WMF:

  * Appium works very much like Selenium, and has bindings for multiple
    programming and scripting languages.
  * Gilt uses Appium with WebDriver and the PageObject design pattern to
    abstract mobile interface elements for testing purposes (very
    similar to what WMF currently does with Cucumber, page-object
    Rubygem, etc)
  * Gilt uses simulators for all of their Appium testing, although
    Appium does have support for testing with real mobile devices.
  * Gilt's overall opinion of Appium is good, although the speaker
    referred to several issues of general flakiness with Appium,
    particularly when Apple releases major updates to Xcode (and the
    associated iOS emulators).
  * Gilt runs automated Appium tests via an internal Jenkins CI instance
    for execution via Sauce Labs (very similar to WMF's existing browser
    test setup).
  * Sauce Labs currently supports mobile app testing via Android and iOS
    emulators.
  * Beyond simulators, Sauce Labs has plans to implement a physical
    "mobile device cloud", which is supposed to be available in 2-3 months


So that's what I learned.  I'd be curious to know if anyone on this list 
has experience writing mobile tests in Appium?

Cheers,

Jeff


[1] http://appium.io/index.html
[2] http://www.gilt.com
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