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