Perfecto Mobile has announced an extension of its Continuous Quality Lab to Appium, an open-source framework for automating native, hybrid and web mobile applications on iOS and Android platforms. The Appium extension will offer an enterprise-grade option for Appium users that provides real user conditions, stable and scalable automation, and real device test clouds for improved mobile quality.

 A shift towards open source tool adoption

“A shift towards open source tool adoption is happening in mobile development, and it is critical for us to embrace this change by supporting industry-leading open source solutions like Appium,” said Roi Carmel, Senior Vice President of Product and Strategy. “Our Appium extension represents our broader initiative to support market leading open source frameworks.”

Speaking exclusively with softwaretestingnews.com, Eran Kinsbruner, Mobile Technical Evangelist at Perfecto Mobile, noted: “Large enterprises have two main challenges when quality testing mobile applications: keeping up with the device market and the growing demand for quick test results.

“We’ve seen a change in strategy in the market over the last two years, a shift left. Open source tools are better integrated with the mobile testing environment and thus reduce testing times and speed up results. When you factor in the power of the cloud and companies like Perfecto Mobile who can offer direct access to over 99% of the device/OS combinations on the market today, developers now only need to focus on quality.”

Appium has become the de facto test source for mobile applications, gaining popularity because it’s free, and secondly because as an extended the protocol of WebDriver (Selenium WebDriver) with extra API methods useful for mobile automation, it is familiar to easy to use for developers. “Appium is still maturing. By extending our Continuous Quality Lab to support Appium, we’re now offering an enterprise-grade option for users, which comes with all the capabilities and security Perfect Mobile customers expect,” Kinsbruner added.

Flexibility with manual and automated testing

“Of the many companies offering the mobile testing service, we have found that Perfecto Mobile provides us with the best support,” said Mashadul Alam, Manager, Master Software Engineer at Capital One. “The Appium framework for both iOS and Android aligns with our acceptance test driven development goals and allows for the most flexibility with manual and automated testing.”

Perfecto Mobile’s Continuous Quality Lab provides organisations with an enterprise-grade lab for testing needs with the freedom for users to select tools in their preferred development language. Extending its lab to support Appium enables users to develop and/or leverage existing scripts without changes, plus the ability to:

1. Execute automated scripts in parallel, under real network and user conditions on real iOS and Android devices.

2. Use Appium for testing complex and advanced use cases that require interaction with the OS or when applications interact directly with each other.

3. Support advanced object identification and validation using images and OCR.

4. Test applications that mimic real end-user conditions and validate the experience of the target user (network conditions, location, device stress, etc.).

The Continuous Quality Lab currently has integrations with several open source frameworks including Selenium’s Remote WebDriver, Calabash and all major Continuous Integration servers such as Jenkins CI. The company will continue to add capabilities to include support for every major IDE and language, adopted CI technology and open source environment through its MobileCloud API.