Pete Hodgson

Software Delivery Consultant

Podcast about Frank and test automation on iOS

August 7, 2010

Some colleagues at Thoughtworks and I recently recorded a 30 minute podcast about Frank, our UI automation tool for iPhone/iPad testing which I introduced in this post.

In the podcast we cover:
  • an overview of Frank, what it is and where it came from.
  • How our testers and developers use Frank and cucumber at our current client (and how we'd ideally like to be using it).
  • Alternatives to Frank, such as iCuke and brominet.
  • Some waffling by me about some of the reasoning that drove my design decisions with Frank. For example, avoiding XML and XPath for UI element selection.
  • Symbiote, the little web app that we embed inside Frank which allows a test creator to inspect and play with the live iOS app as it's running.
  • Writing cucumber feature files per-story versus per-feature.
  • Handling the stateful nature of an iOS app in UI-level tests, and including Frank testing into a Continuous Integration system.
  • The challenges of testing an app which integrates with large back-end systems.
  • What's next for Frank.

Many thanks to Chris Stephenson for organizing and facilitating, and to Derek and Hiyasmin for tolerating my hogging of the mike!

You can get more information on the podcast and give it a listen here.