107: Appium for Beginners with James Koch

Are you just starting off with Appium and not sure where to begin? Not sure which tool to use for your mobile testing automation efforts? In this episode, James covers the basics of how to get started with mobile testing using Appium.

About James

James is a certified software tester through the ISTQB, and IT Solution’s Architect for Quilmont, an automation firm based out of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Operations Technology Management, with a focus in Computer Science from Coastal Carolina University.

James started off as a test engineer with Sirius XM Satellite Radio, and that’s where he was first introduced to automation practices.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• Appium is a free open sourced automation tool used to test mobile, web, and hybrid applications. At it’s heart, it’s a web server that exposes a rest API, and it uses JSON protocol to communicate between your script, the Appium server, and real or virtual devices.
• You can think of JSON as the telephone power lines that transmit your information. Mainly they’re categorized by the verbiage they use, like do, get, or post methods, but Appium manages its runs through sessions, and we think of JSON as the infrastructure your code travels down in the sessions.
• More and more companies are using Appium to automate their tests. I just read today that Yahoo runs over 10,000 tests a day in the SauceLabs platform. We’re seeing this curve switch to Appium, because by nature it’s open sourced, and in a way it’s kind of a destructor to these large enterprise expensive tools. In my opinion, it’s knocking the ball out of the park when it’s comparing to their competition. Unlike test frameworks like Calibash, there’s no real need to recompile or add any third party framework to your app just to test it. That means you’re testing the same app you’re shipping, and you’re able to execute tests on a real production build.
• For Appium beginners it’s important to understand Selenium driver protocol, and really nail down which programming language you wish to use. I prefer JAVA, and anything that’s really object oriented for mobile applications.
• I prefer the PageObject model when I’m designing a customer’s infrastructure, because it’s the most easily understood technique to write and maintain your scripts. Follow me here.
• When I got started, there weren’t really good centralized information that you can follow along with to be started with Appium. Since then, more and more people have written about it, and have developed a lot of processes. I think good advice for you would be take notes on what everybody else is doing, understand the processes that they’re doing, and organize it to adapt it to your structure, and find out what works best for you. I would say, if you’re brand new to Appium, hit the ground running and just start learning it. Our course is a really great resource to get started. Our end goal is for you to be able to write, maintain, and execute Appium scripts.

Resources

• Polarion – ALM solution
• TCM – Test Case Manager is our patented, tool agnostic framework that simplifies your favorite scripting tools.
• Interview with Dan Cuellar the creator of Appium

Connect with James

• Email: Jkoch[@]Quilmont com
• Company: Quilmont.com

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