The last few years have been huge for the world of automation, and they only serve to underscore the importance of Appium's mission: one automation API for every platform. With Appium 2.0 we bring that vision much closer to reality. In my State of the Union this year, I want to focus on what Appium 2.0 means, what's special about it, what's new, and most importantly, how you can get involved in building on top of the Appium platform moving forward.

Recent years have moved teams away from having testers to having developers who test. When we accept we can’t automate without exploring and we can’t explore without automating, the split to manual and automation makes little sense. We need to discover new ways of decomposing the testing work to share that in the team. 

In this effort, we’ve discovered that what we used to expect from one tester, is now split to four developers each with a different emphasis for the team to be successful together. In this talk, we look at how our virtual testing team - a whole team responsible for both developing and testing an application, has split the many hats of testing identifying 15 hats for us to distribute the best way the team sees fit. 

Who carries the hats of a product historian, on-caller, parafunctionalist or feature shaper in your team, and which of the hats are hard to keep up in your current team composition?

In this session, we will get under the hood of WebDriverAgent. We'll discuss the importance of accessibility, and show how WebDriverAgent works with a deep dive on WebDriverAgent and Appium.

Mobile applications are becoming more and more important in our daily lives. From ordering clothes to grocery shopping, the services available via an app are increasing rapidly and users expect a seamless experience. This means that the automation focus is shifting more towards mobile devices. 

But did you know that there is a huge difference between interacting with a desktop browser and a mobile app? And that difference is just a few tiny hand motions! Because with desktop browser automation we mainly focus on using our mouse, but on devices, we use our fingers to execute all different kinds of gestures, like swipe, scroll, pinch/zoom, and many more. Did you also know that automating mobile gestures is one of the most overlooked features in mobile automation?The most common reason for this could be that we don’t know how to do it, or because it might just be too difficult. 

During this presentation, we will focus on how to mimic mobile gestures with Appium for Android and iOS. With a sample app we will explore and understand different gestures including how to scroll, swipe, and pinch/zoom and then create cross-platform and cross-device gestures. By the end of this presentation, you’ll learn how to improve the user experience of your mobile applications by adding gestures to your automation scripts.

Setting up Mac OS X for remote use or as a CI pipeline is never a great experience. Usually we all love using Linux for these purposes, sadly iOS devices don't work on Linux.. or do they? Wouldn't it be cool to just execute Appium servers for iOS devices on Linux machines in Docker containers?  Turns out you can absolutely do that and this talk explains how.

I have created go-ios (https://github.com/danielpaulus/go-ios) an open source library that allows you to access iOS device functions like:

• launch XCTests (like WebDriverAgent, an Appium requirement for iOS testing)
• start and stop apps
• and many more

from the command line on both, Mac OS X and Linux. 

Because we are using unstable, private Apple APIs, I included my reverse engineering tool "dproxy" that you can use to debug future iOS updates or add missing features to go-ios. 

Appium 2.0 allows its users to create their own drivers and plugins for their special needs. At this workshop, you’ll learn Appium 2.0 architecture, how to create your own custom drivers and plugins and what other breaking changes we brought in Appium 2.0. This workshop also helps you to understand several appium internals to contribute back to the Appium codebase

Appium 2.0 allows you to create custom drivers and plugins. User-defined custom commands are available on them. It means you can add new routes in drivers/plugins as you like and can handle it as Appium commands. Some Appium clients provide a feature to define such custom commands as part of them.

I will explain how to add a custom route as a plugin in Appium. I'll also show the way to add a new command in an Appium client to call the custom route. This talk will show the trick so that you can add it by yourself if needed, in case your client does not have such adding a custom command feature.