iOS automation testing: the new baseline skill for ensuring quality

More and more, I’m noticing that automation testing is a key skill set for the modern Quality Engineer. More companies are looking to automation as a way to allow a few people to be incredibly productive. Although people often think of automation testing for front end web applications, there is also a lot of recent attention on adopting the same techniques for iOS native apps.

Here is a very high level list of tools and skills one should adopt when building out a great automation practice.

Tools

Skills (priority order)

Getting Started. I think the most important thing to do is start small. Write a manual test script that approximates what you might do for a smoke test. Your first project might be to turn this manual test into something automated. After you have an automated script created in Javascript, it’s important to get it hooked up to some continuous integration system, like Jenkins, so that it’s actually running automatically. Without this, your test will likely rot in that you might forget about it and it might start to break over time without anyone noticing. Once those steps are complete, then you can safely say that you have a small amount of test coverage! Now keep going and write more tests; you’re likely hooked at this point.

 
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