Testing Mobile Apps Using Katalon Studio & Kobiton’s Cloud-Based Device Farm

How to Test Mobile Apps Using Katalon Studio:

Scripting your first mobile automation test case can be quite confusing without a specialized tool or instruction.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to speed up your automation project using Katalon Studio’s mobile recording utility and run your recorded test cases on hundreds of Kobiton’s mobile devices on a cloud.

For this tutorial, we assume that you have already installed Katalon Studio, got familiar with its basic functions and registered a Kobiton account.

Create mobile automation test cases using Katalon Studio’s recording utility

Before we start, make sure that you have:

• Downloaded the target app under test – Material Login Demo. The app provides a set of simple authentication features that will be automated as demonstrated below
• Configure your Katalon Studio instance for mobile testing

Katalon Studio provides two utilities to accelerate the automation process:

• Mobile Object Spy to quickly populate the project’s object repository
• Mobile Recorder to generate automated scripts from recorded actions

As this tutorial mainly focuses on the functionalities of the Recorder utility, if needed, refer to the Object Spy user guide available from Katalon Studio Documentation on how to use this utility.

#1) Let’s open the sample project (already included in Katalon Studio) and create a new test case. Click on the Mobile Recorder button to open its dialog as shown below.

(NOTE: Click on the image for an enlarged view)

#2) With the dialog open, follow the following steps to configure your recording session.

• Plug in your device or restart your emulator then select it from the Device Name combo box
• Click Browse to select the app file from your computer (.apk for Android and .ipa for iOS apps)
• Click Start and wait for the app to launch on your device

Once the configuration is complete, the app will appear as shown in the screenshot above.

(Note: starting the app is registered as the first recorded action)

#3) With your app ready on your mobile device, you can start recording test cases.

i) Tap on “No account yet? Create one” to navigate to the Create Account screen.
Select the android.widget.TextView0 object in the all objects tree. (Or you can tap the text on the Device view to focus on the object).

Then click the Tap button to record the action. This action simulates a tap on the app.

You will be directed to the Create Account screen.

ii) Fill in the information needed to create an account.

Select android.widget.EditText0 (or tap on the Name text box in the Device view to fill in a name).
Then click Set Text to perform the set text action on the Name text.

Enter “name” for the text input below. Click OK.

The text is set to the device, and the action is recorded in the Recorded action table.

iii) Perform the same steps with the Address field, and enter “address” for this field.

iv) To enter the value for the email field, we will need to hide the on-screen keyboard to make the field visible by pressing the Hide Keyboard action button. Select the Email field to perform a set text action using “email@domain.com”.

v) Follow the same steps for the Mobile Number, Password and Re-enter Password text fields.

vi) Finally, click on Tap to tap on Create Account and you will be redirected to the main screen.

vii) Click Stop on the Mobile Recorder dialog to stop the recording session.

The recorded actions should look like this:

viii) Click OK to complete the recording and then choose a folder to store your captured objects. Click OK again for Katalon Studio to generate test scripts.

#4) View your test case in Manual mode or reply to it to validate all recorded steps. Let’s now add validation points for this test case to verify whether the recorded inputs can be set to the text fields successfully.

• Select the first Set Text From the Add toolbar or by clicking on Add from the context menu, add a Mobile Keyword step and choose the keyword Verify Element Attribute
• Select the test object representing the Name text field, which is a widget.EditText0, as the object to verify
• Double click on the input cell for the test step and set the following values to validate the step of setting text to Name.

• Perform the same procedure for all other Set Text steps.

After adding the validation test steps, try to run the test case again. This time the execution will take longer for Katalon Studios to perform the validation steps, but your test case should pass successfully since the input value is identical to the validation value. You can test with different values or connect to a data source.

Run your mobile automation test case with Kobiton’s cloud devices

#1) Upload the Material Login Demo app to the Kobiton App Repository. From the Repository view, select the More Actions button and select the Automation snippet Copy the app id (the one in bold, for example, Kobiton-store:184′ as shown below) and save it.

#2) Navigate to the Kobiton Devices page. Choose the devices on which you want to run your test and mark those devices as a favorite by clicking on the star icon.

#3) Let’s enable Kobiton integration.

• Open Katalon Studio Preferences (Windows -> Katalon Studio Preferences) then select Kobiton.

• Enter your Kobiton username and password. Click Connect to test the connection and authentication. With a valid account, Katalon Studio automatically retrieves the API keys from Kobiton
• Click Apply or OK to save the settings.

#4) Open the test case created from the previous section, replace the input application path for the first step “Start Application” with the Kobiton app id saved in Step 1.

#5) A new menu option appears under the Execution toolbar below. Click on Kobiton Device to open the Kobiton Favorite Device dialog.

#6) Select your target device for execution from the Favorite Device list. Click OK to start execution with that device. It may take some time to initialize the connection to Kobiton prior to the execution. You should be able to login to the Kobiton sessions to view the results once the test execution is completed.

Conclusion

The combination of Katalon Studio and Kobiton empowers automation engineers to validate the quality of mobile apps by allowing them to execute recorded test cases on hundreds of devices quickly. This solution not only saves them time but also maximizes test coverage.

=> Recommended further reading: Katalon Studio Tutorial

Katalon Studio is a FREE – a full-feature automation solution that you can download from the website. Kobiton is a cloud-based mobile device farm that provides real devices for both manual and automation testing at an affordable price.

About the Author: This is a guest post by Hieu Mai. Currently working as a senior full-stack developer for KMS Technology, Hieu Mai is one of the developers behind Katalon Studio. With 5 years’ experience in Desktop & Mobile applications development and automation testing, Hieu brings this expertise to develop Katalon Studio.

In our next article, we will discuss more on How to Get a Mobile Testing Job Fast.