Speed Up iOS Appium Test Automation

     Appium users have the question like how to speed up the iOS tests, citing the length of time it takes to start tests which use the WebDriverAgent library (all tests using the XCUITest driver).

     Most of the perceived speed of an Appium test can’t be improved due to the base speed of booting devices or the UI actions themselves. The slowest part, which users were asking how to avoid, is the initial startup of a test: the time between sending the first POST /session command and the response indicating that your test script can begin sending commands. We can call this time period the “session creation” time.

     There are desired capabilities we can specify to greatly reduce the time it takes to create a session. Appium is built to cater to a large number of devices, for use in many different situations, but we also want to make sure that it is easy to get started automating your first test. When specifying desired capabilities, Appium will analyze the state of your system and choose default values for every desired capability which you don’t specify. By being more specific, we can have Appium skip the work it does to choose the default values.

     Our first improvement is to set the app location to a file already on the host device. Then you can directly use the bundleId 

caps.setCapability(“bundleId”, “io.test.app”);

      Please ignore the remote path of your application in the code instead of that you can use the local application path, once it gets installed on the device avoid the local path and stick to use bundleId. 

     Running the tests, it’s easy to notice that the app gets reinstalled on the device for each test. This takes a lot of time and can be skipped. You may have certain tests which require a fresh install or need all the app data cleaned, but those tests could be put into a separate suite, leaving the majority of tests to run faster by reusing the same app. Most users should be familiar with the noReset desired capability.

 caps.setCapability(“noReset”, true)

    Appium uses the simctl command-line tool provided by Apple to match the deviceName desired capability to the udid of the device. We can skip this step by specifying the device udid ourselves.

caps.setCapability(“udid”, “009D802528AB4A1BA7C885A9F6FDBE95”);

      When loading the WedDriverAgent server, Appium loads the files from wherever XCode saved it after compilation. This location is called the “Derived Data Directory” and Appium executes an xcodebuild command in order to get the location. Below desired capability derivedDataPath allowing Appium to skip the work of calculating it:

caps.setCapability(“derivedDataPath”, “/Users/sanojs/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/WebDriverAgent-apridxpigtzdjdecthgzpygcmdkp”);

     The last optimization is to specify the webDriverAgentUrl desired capability. If specified, Appium skips a step where it checks to make sure that there are no obsolete or abandoned WebDriverAgent processes still running. The WebDriverAgent server needs to already be running at this location, so we can only use this desired capability after the first test starts the server.

caps.setCapability(“webDriverAgentUrl”, “http://localhost:8100”);

       I hope the above tips will help you to speed up the iOS automation using Appium. Please try to change your Desired Capability today to get a better speed of automation on the iOS platform.

Refer the tips to improve the speed for Android @https://journeyofquality.wordpress.com/category/speed-up-android-appium-test-automation/

Reference: Appium Pro

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