News

Keynote Adds Appium Scripting to Mobile Testing Platform

• By David Ramel
• June 29, 2015

Keynote LLC today announced its mobile app testing solution has been integrated with the open source Appium test automation framework.

Keynote, just acquired by Dynatrace LLC, is integrating with Appium via a plugin to facilitate the automated testing of Web and native -- iOS and Android -- apps.

The functionality is available now with the enterprise edition of the Keynote Mobile Testing platform, joining components such as a cloud-based test bed of real devices that came with the company's 2011 acquisition of DeviceAnywhere.

The company claims its cloud-based testing, monitoring and analytics network tracks more than 700 million mobile and Web site performance metrics each day.

With the Appium integration, Keynote says it wants to bridge the worlds of developer unit testing and full-fledged, end-to-end quality assurance (QA) testing.

"What's great about this integration with Appium, is that it just kind of further enables folks from both the development side of house as well as our customers who live in the quality assurance world to basically be able to work better together," company exec Aaron Rudger told ADT Mag in an interview.

He said conversations with customers indicated that app testing simply wasn't the province of the QA department any longer, with developers using the same tools they build with to conduct small unit tests earlier and more often in the development process.

"It helps us to bridge kind of these two worlds, the world of the QA professional doing these very sophisticated end-to-end cases, and the developer that's writing quick and functional unit tests, and essentially allow them to use those assets together in a more integrated fashion," Rudger said "And so, for the purposes of enhancing and accelerating the process of getting builds pushed through to production, having a common set of tests, that both sides of the house, both development and QA can reference, helps really ensure stronger consistency in the results."

The integrated solution will quicken time to market, Keynote said, by improving collaboration and letting development teams use the tools of their choice, such as Java, Ruby, Selenium or many others.

Rudger expounded on the collaboration aspect. "If I identify some kind of a bug," he said, "if I'm in the QA side and I identify a bug and I need to go back to development -- and it has to do with an integrated representation of the application that includes part of the unit test that the developer ran early on in the cycle -- well, if I'm working from the exact same test, it just makes that interaction, that collaboration, a lot easier."

"There's less of the 'he said, she said' with regard to the representation of results consistently," Rudger said.

The mobile testing platform comes with comprehensive support, Keynote said, and access to the cloud-based device test bed. That service facilitates testing performed across multiple browsers and OSes running on actual devices of all types, including smartphones, tablets, wearables and so on.

The Enterprise edition of the Keynote solution that's now available with Appium integration starts at $750 per month.