Hello everyone, this is Jonathan Lipps and I am really excited to dive into this Appium Pro intro workshop. I thought I would start by saying a few words about what we’re doing here. This is basically the first couple modules of a full two-day training workshop that I’ve run in person at venues around the world. That full workshop is very interactive; there’s a lot of back and forth between myself and the students. There’s sample code and we all talk together and it’s great. But I wanted to make a self-paced online video version of this workshop.
I’m taking the first few modules, so we’re going to talk through Appium set up and some of the basic Appium functionality, and we’ll just run through it here in a video. But it’s going to be very informal. I’m going to just be talking as though I’m running this in-person, so I’m not going to edit it too much and I’m not scripting it. It’s as if you’re sitting in a classroom with me learning about Appium. Let’s look at what we’re going to learn in this little workshop.
The plan is that, first of all, we’re going to have a comprehensive overview of Appium, what it is, why we would use it, things like that. Then we’ll look a little bit at Appium’s architecture. It’s put together in a particular way and I think learning about the way that it’s put together helps when it comes to debugging issues in our tests. We’re going to look at setup. I have instructions for setup on MacOS and windows.
We’re going to look at starting and stopping Appium sessions. We’ll look at using locator strategies to find elements, and we’ll look at how we can figure out the particular IDs or other information we need to use in conjunction with locator strategies to find the right elements. We will, of course, look at what we can do with elements once we’ve found them, things like tapping and typing into elements. Finally, we will look at one of the most important best practices for using Appium, which is waiting appropriately for elements to be ready before we try and interact with them.
As I mentioned earlier, what we’re looking at in this workshop is just a small portion of the topics that I typically cover in a full workshop. Topics including other testing types, visual testing, performance testing, for example, looking at touch actions so that we can perform very complicated gestures on the device screen. Or even testing other kinds of applications like testing mobile web apps or hybrid apps.
There’s a lot more that we cover in the full workshop and I am in the process of working on bringing all this content from the full workshop together, along with training on Selenium, to build out a full Appium and Selenium certification training course that will be released later in 2020. Keep your eyes open for that. That will be kind of like this, but it will be much more scripted, much more heavily edited and produced with high quality video and audio and lots of new sample code, so stay tuned.
Before I move on to the Appium overview, let me say a few words about who I am. Again, my name is Jonathan, and I’ve been involved with Appium since the very beginning of the project, over seven years ago. I’ve put together the initial code for Appium and have continued as the Appium architect and someone who works on the team of Appium maintainers. Appium is a large open-source project, so there’s lots of folks that work on it from day-to-day, not just me. But I do stay involved with the project and review code and try and improve it whenever I can.
I also work at HeadSpin. HeadSpin is a global platform for testing mobile applications and devices. You can take your Appium tests and run them on the HeadSpin platform and also get a bunch of information about the performance and usability of your applications. At HeadSpin, I am the Director of Learning and Education Programs, so I do things like I’m doing now. Trying to make really high-quality test automation content and instruction available to everybody.
Finally, I created something called Appium Pro, which started out as a weekly newsletter and blog and has grown to a library of well over a hundred different tips and tutorials specifically related to Appium. I would highly recommend heading over to appiumpro.com and subscribing so that you can get these tips and tutorials into your inbox every week. Okay. That’s all about me and what we’re doing here. Let’s move on to the first real video where we talk about Appium itself.
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