Virtual mobile devices (emulators/simulators) are a cost-effective and straightforward alternative to testing on physical devices. We showcase how to set-up and scale an Android emulator farm using Appium, Docker and SQS and how it fits into our larger testing and quality strategy.
Maintaining physical test devices for mobile automation can be expensive and time-consuming. On top of the initial investment, you need to consider maintenance cost, replacement devices and efforts for manual scaling. On the other side of the spectrum, cloud providers take care of these restrictions, but their services can come at a hefty price tag, especially when your use-case requires a large number of devices. We present a middle path and demonstrate how to use virtual devices to build a reliable and scalable in-house device lab using Docker and Appium.

Instead of buying test devices and maintaining them on-premise, there is an ongoing trend to facilitate cloud providers for UI test automation. This talk will explain the basics and provide an overview of the advantages and limitations of this approach. It will also tell the story of how we moved from running a handful of tests against four of our own test devices to executing 100+ scenarios (and counting) on AWS Device Farm, Browserstack and a local simulator farm.

Targeting both mobile devices and desktop browsers has become a necessity for successful tech applications. Whether an existing web application triggers the development of native apps or a desktop version is introduced to supplement the smartphone experience, supporting both worlds is a reality for a majority of businesses.
To maximise user experience, an application should behave as identical as possible across all platforms. However, more often than not versions for different platforms are built by different teams with different designers, possibly across multiple sites (even countries, continents, timezones) each with their own tech-stack and development process. In such a set-up, using different tools for automated testing could come naturally and add to the challenges of building a single product.
We argue that a common approach to test automation is critical. Not only will it save time and development costs, it can also increase communication and improve collaboration between teams and be a great facilitator for setting the focus on the product as a whole rather than separate deliverables for each platform. In this sense, it can serve as an umbrella across all involved teams.
We will demonstrate a simple JAVA-based solution using Selenium, Appium and Cucumber to combine testing for different platforms (namely Android, iOS and Web) within the same framework. We will talk about best practices in designing an extendable and easy-to-use test framework and how we can facilitate cloud-based services to integrate our tests into a CI pipeline.