On the Same Wavelength: Adding Radio to Your Testing Toolbox

When smartphones arrived more than a decade ago, software test automation started getting weird. No longer could a team rely only on testing keyboard & mouse inputs, and video outputs. With mobile, inputs and outputs are numerous and the local interactions more complex. With this increased complexity comes the need for new kinds of testing tools. Since 2011, when Jason created his first robot, he’s been using robotics (the real, hardware kind) to tackle novel mobile test automation problems. How do you automate an app that controls a car? How do you automate a point-of-sale transaction? How do you verify that text messages are really being sent through a network?

Although Jason’s focus was on the robot part of those scenarios, there was an invisible, but crucial, reason for *why* mobile testing was getting weird. Important workflows are increasingly relying on radio, which means more of the “user interface” to be tested is now invisible. What we *can’t* see is becoming just as important as what we can see. The robots are there sometimes to merely trigger interesting radio signals to be verified and analyzed later. To be better in our careers as software developers and testers, it might be a good idea to learn more about the things we can’t see, just as much as the things we can.

• Speakers
• Jason Huggins, Founder, Selenium, Appium, Tapster Robotics