Testing a mobile app using Sauce Labs, Jenkins and Appium

In this post we want to briefly tell you how Sauce Labs tool can help us in our automated tests. For this proof of concept, we have used the ownCloud mobile app for testing it.

Sauce Labs

Sauce Labs let us execute automated and manual tests both in mobiles or web tests. It is a cloud platform that supports running automated tests with Selenium WebDriver for web applications and Appium for mobile applications. Besides it let us run parallel and multiplatform tests. In our particular case, due to ownCloud is an open source project, SauceLabs let us use it with unlimited testing minutes and using 5 parallel Vms.

In our case, we are going to run the test in the simulators that SauceLabs provide us, but it exists the possibility of using their device farm (previous payment).

Jenkins

It is an open source continuous integration tool. Once we have our Jenkins server installed, we can configure our project in order to switch it to Sauce Labs using the Sauce Connect option that Jenkins provides. If you want to get more info about the configurations steps about how to connect Sauce Labs with the Jenkins plugin, take a look of how you can configure it.

Appium

Appium is also an open source tool used for test automation for mobile web, native or hydrid apps , based on the popular testing framework, Selenium. In our particular case, we have coded our tests in the programming language Python. You should also install the Sauce Python client, which provides features for reporting job information to the Sauce Labs dashboard.

Learn the configuration steps of how to install it.

Sauce Labs shows in a chronological order the tests that have been run recently, with information about the platform where the tests were run, execution time and info related to the test results. Once the test has completely finished, a report that contains the metadata and the register files is generated, and it is possible to save screenshots to analyse error and verify designs, or even to watch an screencast of the whole test.