‘Practical Desktop App Test Automation with Appium’ eBook is available
A practical guide to implementing test automation for desktop apps on Windows.
I proudly announce my new eBook: “Practical Desktop App Test Automation with Appium”.
Over my 20 years of career in software development/testing, most of the work was on web apps. Despite my bias, desktop apps are still around. We all know that not all software works better in web browsers. For example, mobile apps are more like Desktop Apps except that they are written for mobile platforms.
My test automation work also has primarily been on web apps, and it is not my intention to neglect to automate desktop apps. Automated testing desktop apps is more challenging than web apps as there is no standard behind desktop apps (HTML and JavaScript are for web apps). I did have a try to automate desktop apps with some success, even releasing a small wrapper library RFormSpec based on AutoIT3. However, I was not satisfied in terms of execution reliability and test scripts maintainability.
I have been looking for a standard-based solution like Selenium WebDriver (for web applications). In 2019, I found the answer. The answer is Appium + WinAppDriver, recommended by Microsoft.
Appium is an open-source automation framework for iOS, Android and Windows apps. Appium supports WebDriver, the same protocol that is also used in Selenium for automating web apps. Many people have heard that Appium dominates mobile testing, but might not be for Desktop App testing. The reason is that WinAppDriver v1.0 was only released by Microsoft in October 2017. From my experience, it usually takes Microsoft a few releases to be mature.
I put Appium + WinAppDriver in real use (in September 2019) to test my own native app: TestWise.
As of 2021–11–21, TestWise’s automated regression suite has 306 Appium + WinAppDriver tests. 65,782 test executions over 834 days.
By running this regression suite in the BuildWise Continuous Testing server, I release a new TestWise version regularly on a green build, passing all tests.
It took me over 2 years to complete this book. I do not want it to be just another tutorial resource that guides people in creating a few automated tests for demonstrations. I want it to prove that the TestWise Appium test suite works in real test automation (check out Definition of End-to-End Test Automation Success).