The Page Object Model (POM) revolutionized mobile app testing automation by streamlining development, improving code quality, and encouraging collaboration. Organizing each application page into separate classes enhances maintainability and organization while encapsulating elements ensures code reusability, slashing duplication efforts. Page Object Model architecture localizes UI changes, safeguarding script stability and reliability, crucial for maintaining accurate test outcomes.
Developers should utilize the Page Object Model to enhance their cloud testing cycle. This blog will guide you toward a detailed overview of using the Page Object Model with Appium for efficient test maintenance in mobile app testing.
Appium
Appium is an open-source automation tool for mobile app testing on Windows, iOS, and Android platforms. It supports multi-language scripts, allowing code and developers to write scripts in preferred languages like JavaScript. Appium offers testing choices for various apps by supporting native and hybrid mobile applications. It uses the WebDriver protocol to automate interactions with mobile applications, allowing for text input, swiping, and tapping. Appium is convenient for developers as it doesn’t require any modifications to the program to test it, unlike other tools.
Using the UI Automator (for Android) and XCUITest (for iOS) frameworks, it communicates with mobile apps in a way that guarantees accurate testing results and efficient interaction because of its robust characteristics and cross-platform compatibility. These features of Appium make it a relevant framework for coders and developers among the other frameworks present.
What is the Page Object Model (POM)?
The Page Object Model (POM) is a design pattern widely used in mobile app testing automation, mainly to improve test maintainability, scalability, and reliability in cloud testing. POM organizes test code by classifying each web page or component as a Page Object. These Page objects include their related pages’ components, actions, and characteristics, allowing for a more efficient engagement with UI elements.
POM provides various benefits in mobile app testing. For instance, it encourages flexibility and durability by dividing test code into independent Page Object classes, making maintenance and debugging easier. Secondly, it promotes code reuse by encoding standard UI components and actions, assuring consistency across tests, and minimizing duplicating efforts.
Third, POM improves stability and reliability by locating changes to the UI within Page Objects, making tests more durable and resistant to UI changes. It also encourages team collaboration by standardizing test code structure and emphasizing the distinction between test logic and UI interactions. POM also enhances scalability in cloud testing settings, allowing test suites to effectively adapt to changing application complexity and testing needs. Finally, it will enable cross-platform testing by separating page interactions.
One such cloud platform that can be used for efficient Appium testing is LambdaTest. LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform to run manual and automated tests at scale. The platform allows you to perform real-time and automation testing across 3000+ environments and real mobile devices.
Components of Page Object Model
In mobile testing, the Page Object Model (POM) can be adapted to the specific characteristics of mobile applications. While the essential ideas of POM remain the same, a few elements are created for mobile app testing:
1. Page Class: In mobile testing, page classes represent specific screens or views of the mobile application. Each page class contains the items, actions, and behaviors unique to that screen. For example, you can create separate page classes for the login, home, and settings screens.
2. Actions and Behaviors: Page classes offer operations that represent how users interact with the UI elements on a particular screen. These approaches may involve clicking buttons, inputting text into fields, swiping, scrolling, and confirming text or element presence.
3. Utility Methods: Utility methods can be inserted in the Page Object Model to conduct everyday operations or actions that are not unique to a single screen but are utilized on several screens. Examples are methods for navigating between screens, handling warnings or dialogs, and executing common assertions.
4. Platform-Specific Page Objects: Mobile applications frequently have different user experiences for each platform (iOS and Android). In such circumstances, you may need to develop platform-specific page objects to manage platform-specific actions or elements.
5. Screen Initialization: Additional setup processes, such as opening the application, navigating to a specific screen, or managing device permissions, are frequently required when testing on mobile devices. Before executing test cases, page objects may include methods for initializing the screen or performing setup tasks.
6. Driver Management: Mobile app testing frameworks (like Appium) interact with mobile applications via WebDriver or similar drivers. Page objects can have methods for initializing and controlling the WebDriver instance, dealing with driver configuration, and managing the session lifecycle.
Why should you use the Page Object Model with Appium?
Appium is an open-source automated testing framework relevant to mobile app testing. It uses its WebDriver protocols that allow testers and developers to execute the testing of native, hybrid, and mobile web applications on iOS and Android.
When combined with Appium, POM can enhance your mobile automation tests’ structure, readability, and maintainability.
1. UI Elements Page Objects: A separate page object class is used in POM to represent each screen or page of the mobile application. These classes provide the methods to interact with the UI elements on that specific screen and locators (like IDs, XPaths, and accessibility IDs). This method aids in organizing and modularizing the test code, facilitating interpretation and maintenance.
2. Appium WebDriver Integration: Testers can use a range of locators and actions to interact with mobile applications due to Appium’s WebDriver library. Through integrating Appium WebDriver with POM, testers may effectively locate and interact with user interface elements by utilizing well-known Selenium WebDriver commands, capitalizing on a standardized mobile automation strategy.
3. Separation of Concerns: POM encourages test scripts and user interface interactions to be separated from one another. The element identification and interaction specifics are abstracted into the page objects, and test scripts concentrate on high-level test logic. Because testers can now focus on the business logic rather than the specifics of the UI implementation, the test scripts are more straightforward, simpler to comprehend, and less likely to contain errors.
4. Reusable Components: POM encapsulates user interface elements and their interactions into page objects, which makes them reusable between tests. This results in less redundant code and increased code reuse, which improves test creation and upkeep efficiency.
5. Easy Maintenance: The test suite is easy to maintain because UI changes are confined within the respective page object classes. Instead of modifying each test script that interacts with the UI or application flow, testers must update the relevant page object classes when those elements change. This method lowers the possibility of mistakes and streamlines maintenance tasks.
6. Improved Readability: POM-written test scripts are usually easier to read and understand. Examining the high-level interactions with page items helps testers easily understand the tests’ flow. As a result, team members work together better and may more easily share knowledge.
Mobile app testing can be organized, manageable, and effective by combining Appium with the Page Object Model. It facilitates readability, encourages code reuse, organizes tests better, and makes maintenance easier.
Integration of Page Object Models with Appium
This part of the blog provides a full overview of how to automate mobile app testing using Appium and the Page Object Model (POM).
1. Setup Your Project Structure:
Create a structure for your project layout. Here’s an example using Java:
project/
│
├── src/
│ ├── main/
│ │ └── java/
│ │ └── pages/ # Page Object classes
│ │ └── LoginPage.java
│ │ └── HomePage.java
│ │ └── utils/ # Utilities (e.g., driver setup)
│ │ └── AppiumDriver.java
│ ├── test/
│ │ └── java/
│ │ └── tests/ # Test scripts
│ │ └── LoginTest.java
2. Create Page Object Classes:
Page objects represent the pages or screens of your application. Each page object encloses the locators and methods to engage with the UI elements on that page.
Here’s an example in Java:
import io.appium.java_client.MobileElement;
import io.appium.java_client.android.AndroidDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
public class LoginPage {
private AndroidDriver<MobileElement> driver;
public LoginPage(AndroidDriver<MobileElement> driver) {
this.driver = driver;
}
// Locators
By usernameField = By.id(“username”);
By passwordField = By.id(“password”);
By loginButton = By.id(“loginButton”);
// Methods to interact with elements
public void enterUsername(String username) {
driver.findElement(usernameField).sendKeys(username);
}
public void enterPassword(String password) {
driver.findElement(passwordField).sendKeys(password);
}
public void clickLoginButton() {
driver.findElement(loginButton).click();
}
}
3. Setup Your Appium Driver:
Create a utility class to initialize and manage the Appium driver.
Example in java / / AppiumDriver.java
import io.appium.java_client.android.AndroidDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.DesiredCapabilities;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
public class AppiumDriver {
public static AndroidDriver<MobileElement> initializeDriver() throws MalformedURLException {
DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
// Set desired capabilities (e.g., device name, platform version, app package, app activity, etc.)
// Initialize Appium driver
return new AndroidDriver<>(new URL(“http://127.0.0.1:4723/wd/hub”), capabilities);
}
}
}
4. Write & Execute Your Test Scripts:
Create test scripts using your preferred testing framework (e.g., TestNG, JUnit) and instantiate the driver in the test setup.
Example in java
// LoginTest.java
import org.testng.annotations.BeforeClass;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;
public class LoginTest {
private AndroidDriver<MobileElement> driver;
private LoginPage loginPage;
@BeforeClass
public void setUp() throws MalformedURLException {
driver = AppiumDriver.initializeDriver();
loginPage = new LoginPage(driver);
}
@Test
public void testLogin() {
// Perform login
loginPage.enterUsername(“username”);
loginPage.enterPassword(“password”);
loginPage.clickLoginButton();
// Add assertions and further test steps here
}
Execute your test scripts using your preferred test runner or build tool.
Additional Tips:
- Maintain a clear separation between test logic and page objects to keep your tests clean and maintainable.
- Use Appium Inspector or similar tools to inspect and identify UI elements and their locators.
- Ensure exception handling and cleanup in your test scripts to handle unexpected scenarios and release resources properly.
- Consider parameterizing your test data and using data providers for more comprehensive test coverage.
Following these steps, you can effectively use Appium with the Page Object Model for mobile app testing, enabling you to create scalable, maintainable, and reliable test suites.
Conclusion:
Finally, the benefits of integrating cloud testing with the Page Object Model (POM) are numerous. To perform tests concurrently on several virtual machines, it first improves scalability by utilizing cloud infrastructure. This allows test suites to be executed faster. It also facilitates simple cloud testing environment installation and configuration, which saves setup time and permits on-demand resource allocation. All of these features contribute to greater flexibility.
Integrating the Page Object Model (POM) with Appium for mobile app testing provides considerable productivity, maintainability, and dependability benefits. By dividing each application page into different classes and enclosing UI elements and interactions within page objects, testers may speed up development, increase code quality, and encourage team communication.
Overall, using Appium’s Page Object Model enables testers to develop scalable, stable, and dependable test suites, which leads to increased efficiency and quality in mobile app testing.
