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.

How do we know we're doing a good job when we develop, release and run the software?  Software analytics can provide data and evidence to help us know how we've been performing and help us improve our practices for future releases so we also improve our software. Using analytics well can increase our leverage and make both us and our users more satisfied. We will cover usage analytics and how it can help us find problems that escaped our development and testing and how it can provide insights into how our users use our software.

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?

Q & A with the Appium Core Committers:

• Jonathan Lipps
• Kazuakai Matsuo
• Sai Krishna
• Srinivasan Sekar
• Ayan Khan
• Christopher Hiller
• Mykola Mokhnach

Naresh Jain would moderate this panel.

Dan was selected to speak at Selenium Conference 2012 in London about an entirely different topic. As part of his presentation, he showed off iOS Automation using Selenium syntax to demonstrate writing platform-agnostic tests that use separate platform-specific page objects with a common interface. To his surprise, the cool test architecture would take a backseat to the spectacle of iOS tests running like WebDriver tests. Several people suggested that he give a lightning talk later in the conference to explain exactly how it worked.

On the second day of the conference, Dan stepped up on stage to give the lightning talk. Jason Huggins, co-creator of Selenium, moderated the lightning talks. Dan experienced technical difficulties getting his presentation to load, and Jason nearly had to move on to the next lightning talk. At the last moment, the screen turned on and Dan jumped into his presentation. He explained the details of his implementation and how it worked, begged for contributors, and in five minutes it was over. The crowd applauded politely, and he left the stage.

If we look at how Appium came into existence, lightning talks are a very important part of this journey. Hence at Appium Conf, we would like to dedicate a full session with all attendees on Lightning talk.

Software development can be a real grind, but one thing that makes it more bearable is the joy of a passing build. Not only is that green bar important when you're iterating on a feature, but it's normally a vital part of determining whether or not your software can be released. Getting to a green build as quickly as possible allows you to experience the joy of a passing build more frequently, and allows you to verify that the next release is good more quickly than your competitors. It's a vital building block as we move towards Continuous Deployment. Given how important fast builds are in your software development, how can you make the most of Selenium 4 to help get you there? In this Keynote, Simon Stewart, Selenium Project Lead & Creator of WebDriver, covers how automation frameworks can make your life easier and your builds faster and shows how you can best use them to help reduce your build times.

Fireside Chat between Jonathan Lipps, Appium project lead and Ayan Khan, youngest active committer to Appium project.

What really is the role of a tester? What activities can we perform on a daily basis, to help the company we work for achieve its goals? Should we focus only on finding and logging bugs? Or can we contribute with much, much more? Do we, as testers, see the whole picture, and are we as involved in the software development process as we could be? Do we shine and put in our best effort at work? 

In this talk I will highlight how many activities we, as testers, can contribute and provide valuable input to. Our product experience, talent and our analytical thinking can help shape requirements, speed up delivery, improve customer experience or improve faulty processes. We can make a difference in how we achieve quality in an organization by getting more involved. And in turn, all of this will help in our personal development and in us being recognized as highly skilled, amazing professionals.

Writing code is easy, but writing good code takes a lot of practice and hard work.

Automating tests is easy, but identifying and automating the "right scenarios" takes experience, understanding of the big picture and then automating the same. Similarly, in many products, there are multiple "user-personas / roles" involved in completing a scenario. However, we end up automating only the single-user scenarios, as that is easy. But this approach does not provide enough ROI from your automation perspective.

In this session, we will share the approach taken to automate tests simulating the real-world, multi-user scenarios, where each user could be on a different platform (Android, iOS, Windows Desktop, Web) and the test orchestrates the interaction between these personas.

This approach is based on open-source tools and frameworks - Selenium WebDriver, Appium, AppiumTestDistribution and teswiz.

Empathy gives you the ability to understand your users and their context and also makes you more in-tune towards their needs and wants. For a person working in a product team, understanding users is an important part of their job and if you are a software tester, product designer, or product manager, this becomes the most significant part of your day-to-day duties.

In this talk, we will discuss how empathy can help you understand your users better and create products that stick and delight their users. It helps in improving your underlying KPIs, like new users and user retention.

Appium proves to hold a lot of value in the effort of achieving mobile application automation. Appium allows more granular control in automation efforts compared to scriptless automation. Though, to programmatically code text and visual assertions in appium scripts can be tedious and time-consuming, along with yielding not-so-ideal script bloat that can be difficult to maintain as an application changes from release to release. By applying an AI-driven engine on top of appium automation and providing a baseline session, AI can return text and visual discrepancies far faster than the original, programmatic attempt with less effort and maintenance. This allows quality engineers to not only catch more defects within their automation, but also allow them to automate additional tests quicker while still gaining the advantages of appium automation.

Parallel test execution is crucial for when we want to scale our testing efforts and reach a faster time to market.
When testing dual-way communication apps, such as Whatsapp or Telegram, sender and receiver tests needs to be synchronized.

In this short session, we will see how such tests can be created and executed in parallel on two iOS devices, in parallel.
One test will be running the "sender" part sending a message, and another will be the "receiver" end, awaiting it.

The tests will run on iOS 15 physical devices, using Appium and Windows operating system.

In our mission to build scalable and reliable test automation frameworks, we need to find a way to reduce test flakiness and the time spent on maintenance to a minimum. In this talk, we will explore the usage of TestProject's free AI tools for native mobile & web scriptless test automation, while reducing test flakiness. We will be able to build stable test cases without any programming skills, all while utilizing the best-in-class open-source frameworks Selenium and Appium.

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.

Most of us use Appium Inspector as a pre-requisite to automating our tests. As app testing becomes more and more advanced, so does Appium Inspector. In this talk, we’ll explore new and different modes in Inspector, recording with Inspector, and the web version of inspector.

Traditional testing is a waste of our time and money. At the same time, the demand for higher quality products is constantly increasing and our businesses are constantly transforming to digitally empower their consumers. Consumers are engaging with our applications in many different ways than they did just a few years ago. This has forced us to reevaluate the way we release our software.

In today’s age of digital transformation, it is important to understand the critical role of test automation in software product development and release.

With the Continuous Testing approach, test automation is carried out along with product development to support Continuous Integration. In this session, we will try to look at an overview of test automation and the impact it will have on your business.

Selenium 4 brings a brand new Grid, full of features and great things! Grid 4 has a new flexible architecture, allowing you to run it in a fully distributed mode, in the traditional Hub/Node mode, or in the simple Standalone more. It has built in observability and GraphQL endpoints, and even a good looking UI!

But wait... If Grid 4 is so great, why can't I use Appium with it? I want to scale up my tests!

The wait is over! This presentation will demonstrate how Appium can be used with Selenium Grid 4. More in detail, it will:

• Give an overview of how Grid 4 works
• Show how to configure Grid 4 to make it work with Appium
• Share tips to migrate from Grid 3 to Grid 4

Join this presentation, we will take Grid 4 for a ride and you will learn how to use it to scale up your mobile testing!

Goal:

Problem Statement:

Expensive parallel connection limit:

Shift Left and Scalability:

Restricted Real Device Usage:

Data Center vs Cloud:

Desktop is still king of conversion:

In App Browser Testing:

Emerging Country Specific Browser:

New Opportunities - Evolution of Technologies

Solution:

What if you had to support a custom locator in your project and with Appium 1.0 it was not possible. This would lead us to maintain a fork and make our required changes. Which in turn is an overkill as we have to always keep up with upstream. 

With Appium 2.0 architecture we can create plugins for our special needs. At this talk, we are going to talk about Appium 2.0 architecture, how to create custom plugins and what other breaking changes we brought in Appium 2.0. 

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.