Mobile testing confirms that applications run smoothly across numerous operating systems and devices. Selenium, renowned for its effectiveness in automating web applications, has extended its reach into the mobile world. It allows developers to take advantage of its abilities for mobile app testing. Like any complex automation process, Selenium mobile testing faces unusual challenges, especially when handling flaky tests, dynamic UI elements, and real-device issues.
Flaky tests are a common source of disturbance. Additionally, testing is much more complex these days with dynamic user interface elements that might alter in real time, making it difficult to find and interact with them. Adding to these challenges, testing on actual devices brings problems like network instability, device fragmentation, and different performance characteristics, all of which widely affect test dependability.
Understanding Selenium Mobile Testing
Selenium Mobile Testing is the procedure of automating the testing for mobile web apps and mobile browsers with Selenium WebDriver. Even though Selenium was originally made to automate desktop web applications, it may also be used in mobile browser websites such as Chrome on Android or Safari on iOS. However, it is inadequate for automating native mobile applications (apps created especially for iOS or Android); Appium and similar solutions are often used in conjunction with Selenium for this purpose.
Key Aspects of Selenium Mobile Testing
The key aspects of Selenium Mobile Testing are:
- Desired Capabilities: Based on the idea of desired capabilities, Selenium determines the mobile device’s platform, like Android or iOS, device name, and browser, like Safari or Chrome.
- Mobile devices: Selenium may be used to automate web applications on mobile devices, along with Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS.
- WebDriver Interface: Often used in regular Selenium automation, the WebDriver API permits mobile browsers for interaction with web components (including buttons, forms, and links) on mobile websites.
- Testing Mobile Websites: Mobile web apps behave differently from desktop websites. Since they need to be flexible and designed for small screens and touch interactions. Selenium can be used to evaluate the web application’s performance across a variety of mobile browsers.
- Testing Native/Hybrid Mobile Applications: Testing native or hybrid mobile applications (iOS or Android) needs more than just Selenium WebDriver. This is because Selenium is particularly designed for web apps. It is unable to directly catch up with native app features like the camera, notifications, or GPS.
Appium, which automates mobile apps using the Selenium WebDriver API and helps native mobile app interactions such as interacting with native items, using gestures, and accessing device capabilities, is of high importance for testing native mobile apps.
Understanding flaky tests in Selenium mobile automation
Flaky tests are those that produce odd results, sometimes passing and sometimes failing without necessitating modification to the environment, application, or code. This is mostly true in the context of mobile automation. These tests are more unpleasant since they provide inconsistent feedback, making it difficult to discern between issues with the app and the test. Device fragmentation (due to variations in hardware, screen sizes, and operating systems), network instability, and UI animations can produce flaky tests. Additionally, dynamic element locators that vary with each session, timing, and synchronization problems (such as waiting for elements to load) are some of the other factors that frequently lead to flaky tests in mobile automation.
Causes of Flaky Tests:
- Problems with synchronization: Slow-loading features, animations, and transitions are common in mobile applications. If the test tries to interact with these before the elements are available, it may fail.
- Unreliable Network Conditions: Some problems, such as poor Wi-Fi, may arise due to different network conditions if the test is dependent on network connectivity and timeouts.
- Timeouts and Delays: When compared to desktop browsers, mobile devices may take longer to load or react to actions.
How to Handle Flaky Tests:
- Implicit Waits: If an element cannot be discovered, it instructs Selenium to wait a predetermined time before raising an exception. While it might help manage brief delays, overuse can cause problems with performance.
- Explicit Waits: These are more precise and wait until a particular condition is met, such as the visibility of an element or its ability to be interacted with. Use WebDriverWait to wait for dynamic elements.
- Handling Network Latency: Incorporate retries and error-handling logic that can cope with varying network conditions.
- Retry Logic: Frameworks like TestNG or JUnit allow testers to retry failed tests automatically a set number of times.
Handling dynamic UI elements in Selenium mobile applications
Dynamic UI elements in mobile applications are a critical aspect of mobile automation testing, especially when dealing with elements that change frequently or are generated dynamically at runtime. Mentioned below are some strategies to handle these.
- Use Stable Locators: Avoid using dynamic locators like changing IDs or class names. Instead, use stable identifiers such as accessibility IDs, which are specifically designed for consistent identification across different sessions or builds. If accessibility IDs are not available, consider using other reliable attributes like labels or text.
- Explicit Waits: The loading or rendering of dynamic user interface elements frequently takes some time. To prevent the test from attempting to interact with an element before it is ready, explicit waits are used. Developers can avoid interacting with elements too soon by waiting for them to become visible, clickable, or exist in the DOM.
- Managing Dynamic material: When new information is pulled from the server or when an element is added to a list, mobile apps may load material asynchronously. Waiting for the element to show up or be prepared for engagement is required in these situations. Before taking any further action, it is crucial to allow for these delays and wait for the dynamic material to fully load.
- Using Animations to Interact: A lot of mobile applications have animations or screen changes, which can make some parts unavailable for interaction right away. Wait for animations to finish before interacting with any elements to prevent faulty tests if the application does not permit stopping animations during testing.
- Managing Dynamic Lists or Elements: Mobile applications frequently show dynamic grids, tables, or lists that alter in response to user input. In contrast to depending on their position in a list, which might fluctuate dynamically, it is crucial when working with such elements to locate objects based on stable qualities such as visible text or unique attributes.
- Pop-ups and alarms: User actions frequently cause pop-ups, modals, and alarms to be dynamically activated. During a test, these components could show up out of the blue and cause disruptions. To manage them, testers must wait for the alert to emerge, decide whether to accept or reject it, and make sure the test proceeds without any problems.
- Resolving Visibility Issues: In certain cases, elements are originally hidden and only show up when a specific action or condition is fulfilled (for example, when a user scrolls or a network request is finished). To avoid mistakes, it is important to wait until certain elements are visible before interacting with them.
- Test-Specific Conditions: It’s important to properly configure the application before conducting the tests for dynamic user interface elements that depend on particular app states or test conditions (such as being signed in or having particular data available). To ensure that the components act perfectly throughout the testing, mock data or the app’s state might be prepared beforehand.
Real-Device challenges and considerations in Selenium Mobile Testing
Due to differences in screen sizes, operating systems, performance, and device-specific behavior, testing on actual devices presents several difficulties.
Challenges:
- Device fragmentation: There are numerous devices with a variety of operating systems, performance attributes, and screen sizes.
- Real-Time Interactions: On the other hand, simulators or emulators, real devices have restrictions (such as battery life), interruptions (such as calls or notifications), and erratic performance.
- Device Maintenance: It might be time-consuming to keep devices connected, manage app installations, and ensure they are set up correctly.
- OS-Specific Behavior: The implementations and behaviors of Android and iOS differ, necessitating the use of distinct testing methodologies.
Handling Real-Device Challenges:
- Use Real-Device Cloud Services: Cloud services like LambdaTest provide access to a wide range of real devices for testing without the need to maintain a physical device lab.
Lambdatest is an AI-native test orchestration and execution platform used for testing web and mobile applications manually and automatically at scale across 5000+ real devices, browsers and OS combinations.
By handling several issues, including erratic tests, dynamic user interface components, and real-device complexity, LambdaTest greatly improves Selenium mobile testing while also guaranteeingmobile-friendly tests.
Through its cloud-based infrastructure, testers can test across different devices, screen sizes, hardware configurations, and operating systems. Ensuring consistency across different environments and parallel execution on various devices reduces the impact of environment-specific problems and helps get rid of flaky tests.
Furthermore, dynamic user interface elements are correctly synced because LambdaTest supports Selenium’s wait methods, which permit testers to interact with elements only after they have completely loaded. The platform’s real-device testing features also get around the drawbacks of emulators and simulators, yielding more accurate findings in real-world scenarios such as fluctuating device performance and network outages.
LambdaTest improves the efficiency, dependability, and scalability of mobile automation testing by providing extensive debugging tools, device fragmentation support, and network simulation. This guarantees that the tests are mobile-friendly and functional on a range of devices and environments.
- Automate Device Setup: Use automation scripts to configure devices and install apps on them for testing. You can use tools like Appium or Selenium Grid to manage devices remotely.
- Network and Resource Constraints: Ensure tests handle battery management, network state (Wi-Fi vs. mobile data), and device storage properly. Testers can simulate network changes and power constraints in Appium.
- Consistent App Versioning: Make sure the application versions on real devices match the version being tested and that all dependencies (e.g., webviews, plugins) are correctly set up.
Conclusion
Although Selenium is a great tool for mobile testing, it must be used carefully to handle flaky tests, dynamic elements, and real-device problems. Through the use of best practices such as explicit wait synchronization, dynamic locators, device cloud services, and strong test setups, developers and testers may increase the efficacy and dependability of their mobile test automation initiatives.
