In today’s agile world the time to market is becoming increasingly shorter. There is a constant desire to release ASAP to keep ahead of the competition and to please users with updated/new features. Because of this, we have less time to fully do manual and exploratory testing of our apps. Especially, when you consider all the combinations of OS's, Locales, Accessibility, Orientations & Resolutions apps support. Running anywhere from 1 to 100's of Appium crawler bots (covering all of those combinations) at once we can discover more issues quickly and efficiently without having to write a line of code.

UI Automation also has its limitations as it only tests for expected results. Crawler bots test the unexpected, by collecting metadata such as logs, app strings, screenshots, memory and reporting back it’s finding for review so we can test all these combinations quickly and more efficiently. In this talk, I will go over the current challenges we face in today's development world, why we need more tools to help us keep pace, and cover how you can build your own Appium crawler.

I've open sourced this tool and is available here for everyone to use: https://github.com/isonic1/Appium-Native-Crawler

Apple and Google’s test automation framework does not natively support W3C standards for few web driver spec implementations directly for e.g TouchActions interface in XCTest, etc. Although test automation frameworks support a rich set of those functions specific to platforms, Appium does provide ways to directly invoke these functions e.g gestures, biometric handling, etc.

Many special behaviors and workarounds are made available and achieved only through executing platform-specific native commands of Appium. For instance, there are 100+ issues been reported on date picker or handling picker wheel in the appium organization but it can be achieved quite easily by executing native mobile commands.

There are so many that testers might not get chance to go through each one of these and get acquainted with all of those. Native mobile commands help to handle much complex use cases like biometric handling, talking to Siri, performance profiling, etc quite easily.

Nowadays, more and more companies are building test automation frameworks based on WebDriver and Appium for testing their web and mobile projects. A big part of why there are so many flaky tests is that we don't treat our tests as production code. Moreover, we don't treat our framework as a product. In the talk, you will see examples of how you can automate the testing of your test automation framework and be sure that it is highly reliable. You can get lots of ideas for various types of tests such as learning tests verifying that 3rd party dependencies are not breaking the code, compatibility tests checking that the UI components are working for each mobile control on each OS, cross-platform verifications for testing whether everything is working on multiple OS. Sample test environments for storing different distributions of the framework packages will be presented.

It is essential to track user logs correctly to improve and develop your own web/mobile services continuously. For instance, how users flow on your applications to evaluate if they work expectedly or not.

Meanwhile, mobile application trends have been changed quickly such as architectural things or UI related one. Developers continue to add, refactor or rewrite their applications frequently. They also need to release them frequently, 2-week release for instance. Their business also changes quickly. A number of developers working for one application also has been increasing.

As a result, it is quite difficult to catch up with everything. Developers know a part of them. They add, rewrite or refactor codebase they do not know well with exploratory it. Functionalities related to UI are easy to understand. But, it is difficult to uncover what happens in the backend such as what kind of logs the app sends to servers.

In Android case, if one application sends a log to a server on a fragment's onCreate. But the fragment can use in another view. If a developer does not know what the log means, he/she might re-use the fragment in another view if he/she think they can re-use it. It can break activity logs collecting on the server side. How to maintain logs is also an interesting topic though.

In general, we notice the breaking after releasing the app since we can easy to observe the number statistically. But, it means we can not use the data to evaluate our business correctly until we fix it and re-release it.

In this talk, I would like to show an example of how I had been implemented to uncover the above thing following some scenarios based on my experience. It might be an example what we already can automate in the mobile world.

This topic is similar to monitor CPU/Memory/network thing. This story is based on my experience I had been worked for a couple of years.

Have you ever wondered how Appium works under the covers? Do you get frustrated with locators not locating, app screens not loading, or test behaving inconsistently from one run to the next? Appium is an attempt to unify thousands of disparate elements across a wide spectrum of challenges into a single, common interface that works seamlessly across all the major mobile and desktop OSs - and yet only a handful of volunteers work to maintain this gigantic effort. If you would like to enhance your own Appium experience while contributing back to the software that has defined so many of our careers, come to this workshop. We'll dissect the different elements of Appium, dive into its internals, learn how it was built and how to make changes to it, and even write a unit test you can contribute on the same day!

Android's Espresso framework was created as a "gray-box" testing framework, "gray-box" meaning that it's an automated UI testing framework ("black-box") but it has access to the internals of the application ("white-box"). Allowing access to the internals of the application-under-test opens up many new testing possibilities that weren't possible with UiAutomator2 (with some risks).

Here are the four new possibilities I would like to discuss (with coding examples)

• Access to internal app code
• Less flakiness thanks to "IdlingResource". No need for 'waits' and 'delays' for UI.
• Navigate WebViews using Espresso WebAtoms (this feature is in progress, will be ready well before June)
• Find elements off-screen using Espresso's DataMatchers (this feature is in progress, will be ready well before June)