There are thousands ways if not more to setup your automation testing environment. It is often crucial when it comes to stability and maintainability. While you can build a custom framework that fits your needs there are often already sophisticated setups or frameworks available that get you up and running very quickly.

WebdriverIO is one of these frameworks that is written in Node.js. It gets you up and running within minutes and allows you to scale up your test suite while maintaining your execution time by running tests in parallel. With its huge project community it is an ideal choice for small as well as big projects that use modern frameworks such as React, Angular or Vue.js.

In this workshop you will learn everything you need to know to run a successful, stable and maintainable WebdriverIO framework. It starts with an introduction to the project and the basic concepts and will end with a sophisticated framework that includes testing strategies like Frontend Performance Testing as well as complex browser interaction with Puppeteer.

Almost 13 years ago we started with Selenium to automate websites. With Appium we generalised that concept on mobile and just recently entered the Windows and Mac space by adding a Windows and Mac OS driver to the Appium family. Let’s continue our StarDriver quest and enter a (not quite) new sphere: the television. Within the last years, a new standard called Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) evolved with which the latest generation of Smart TVs has been equipped. This standard allows broadcasters to build web apps for their broadcast channels to provide additional context information to the TV stream or videos on demand.

The number of HbbTV apps being developed is increasing more and more as the standard gets rolled out to the whole world. By now almost all TV manufacturers support the standard and due to the high number of TVs in the market the fragmentation is extreme. Different TVs run different proprietary rendering engines with a different level of JavaScript support. Until today the only way to test an HbbTV app is by taking the remote control and manually walking through the app, this has to change.

This talk will introduce a new driver to Appium that allows the running of automated tests based on the Webdriver protocol for HbbTV apps on Smart TVs. It will explain not only how the driver works but also how in general other drivers do their job in the Selenium and Appium world. We will look into the challenges that automating an app for a TV device brings and will talk about how anyone can build a driver for anything.