CincyCocoaDev:UI Automation for iOS

UI Automation for iOS

So, for the nth time, you fire up your awesome iOS app to run through your testing steps. Manually. Over and over. And you have to do the same tests on the iPad. And the iPod touch. On iOS 4 and then 5. And you just want to pull your hair out. Oh, and you just found a memory leak. Fix it and start over again. And again.

Meet UI Automation, Apple's official UI testing framework. You manipulate your app with Javascript through the views and controls, similar to the way you'd manipulate a web page. The scripts can drive the simulator or even the device. As part of Instruments, Apple's performance monitoring and debugging tool, you can automate your apps through all kinds of scenarios and evaluate the performance or memory usage. It's so powerful and flexible that it can look a little overwhelming at first. We'll investigate the framework through live interactive demos against a real application and walk through good practices to keep your test suite organized as it grows.

About Jonathan Penn

Jonathan Penn is a software developer, author, and entrepreneur with a long history of quality work enriched with mischief. He speaks on software development topics whenever he gets a chance, is the mad scientist behind the apps at navel-labs.com (http://navel-labs.com/), and scribbler-in-chief at cocoamanifest.net (http://cocoamanifest.net/), a technical blog for exceptional iOS resources and commentary.