Often times when doing end-to-end testing, whether it is for a website or a mobile app, people tend to pass up on ever running their test suites on an actual mobile device, where the majority of their users are, or even writing a test suite to run for their mobile applications.
Instead, many tend to “emulate” testing their websites on mobile by simply reducing the size of the viewport on desktop browsers, which doesn’t always behave the same as your mobile browser, as we’ll see. And when it comes to testing mobile applications, many people resort to manual testing instead of automating it, which is both time-consuming and risky.
But why avoid testing on mobile devices, even on Android emulators / iOS simulators? Mostly because testing on mobile is hard! And we’ve experienced it first-hand when we tried to set up everything ourselves in order to understand how mobile testing works and leverage that understanding to add support for mobile testing in Nightwatch.js. It was brutal!
So, when adding the mobile-testing support in Nightwatch.js, we tried to make sure that our users don’t have to go through the same agony as we did while trying to set up everything, and make the entire process as seamless for them as possible.
By the end of the talk, you will know how end-to-end testing works in general and why you should start testing on mobile, even if it's on an emulator. There will also be a live demo on how you can set up everything you need to get started with mobile testing in just a few minutes, and run your first test on an emulator as well as a real mobile device.