TMI

It's like a very basic Selenium for iPhone and iPad apps.

Created to help build an iPad product my team were delivering.

We wanted a safety net of automated tests, unit testing for iOS seemed really challenging.

We examined some existing solutions ...

• UISpec
• Bromine/Brominet
• iCuke

... but none were quite right.

here's a demo of Frank in action

Frank combines several existing open source tools

• UISpec, a lower-level Objective-C testing library
• cocoahttpserver, a lightweight embeddable HTTP server
• cucumber, and various ruby gems

It's also spawned a few little tools itself

• sim_launcher - launch arbitrary iOS apps in the simulator from the command line
• slow_hand_cuke - better feedback on what cucumber step is currently executing
• timestamped_scenarios - add timestamps to cucumber output

• A framework for Behavior Driven Development
• express business requirements in the language of the domain
• automate verification of those requirements
• most commonly used for describing the behavior of web apps

Given ...
When ...
Then ...

Scenario: Successful log in

Given I have launched my app
When I fill in the "username" textbox with "pete"
And I fill in the "password" textbox with "sekrit"
And I touch the button marked "Logon"
Then I should see "Welcome back, Pete"

see here for further examples

Slightly scary regex's, and not-so-scary ruby

Then /^I should see a "([^\"]*)" button$/ do |expected_mark|
  check_element_exists("button marked:'#{expected_mark}'")
end

Can also call steps from within steps. Careful with that.

Lots of precanned stuff (particularly for iPhone), similar to Webrat/Capybara.

Frank comes with a set of pre-defined steps. For example:

• Given the device is in landscape orientation
• When I fill in "foo" with "bar"
• When I touch the table cell marked "foo"
• When I simulate a memory warning
• Then I should see "foo"
• Then I wait to see "foo"
• Then I should see an alert view
• etc

see here for the full set of core steps

Web Testing: CSS or XPath

Frank: UISpec's UIScript syntax

Syntax is a little funky, but servicable.

tableView button marked:'Add'

Allows traversal (e.g. all children, first child, parent) and filtering (e.g. just views of class UIButton, with accessibilityLabel 'foo')

The Frank server comes bundled with a single-page web app called Symbiote. It's like a very basic Firebug for iOS apps.

By default it runs on http://localhost:37265/

Allows inspection of a running app's view heirarchy (i.e. DOM)

Allows testing of selectors on a running app

What's different?

• State!
• Hardware constraints - memory, rotation, performance
• Only one platform!
• testing tooling is still immature, for now

What's the same?

• Maintaining a big test suite is hard
• Seperation of business language from UI/technical language

Learning from mature tooling (like Selenium!)

If all goes well, Frank has a lot of growing pains to look forward to!

Sharing tests across platforms

Business functionality doesn't care whether it's implemented on web, iOS, Android, whatever

Other stuff

Maybe moving beyond Cucumber and Ruby?

• These slides are available here
• Frank is open source, and available on github
• We have a growing community centered around our mailing list. Join us!
• My initial blog post announcing Frank
• A podcast about Frank recorded with some colleagues at ThoughtWorks

I'm always happy to talk more about Frank, and about mobile testing in general.

• @beingagile
• phodgson@thoughtworks.com