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.

Appium 2.0 manages driver/plugin dependencies in .appium directory. The path can be customized by --appium-home argument. This talk will show the usage of --appium-home so that you can manage your local environment for particular usage.

This talk will also show --drivers and --plugins arguments to load necessary modules to improve the initial starting time.

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.

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!

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.

Through a story of my contribution to OSS projects, especially Appium, you can learn how you can start contributing to OSS world. I would also give some examples to start it.