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Feature Friday – How to Make Testing Easier With Inspect Mode Feature
It’s Friday, and, after all, isn’t the whole point of the week the weekend? Before we jump into that, we’re here to bring you another installment of Feature Friday! This week, we are discussing our inspect mode feature for use in our mobility testing. This week, we are lucky enough to have three amazing experts from our Qyrus team to shed some light on inspect mode for both Android and iOS devices. Without further to do, let’s hop right in!
Tell us more about inspect mode offered by Qyrus and its use cases.
Brett:
Inspect mode is a feature offered with mobility testing in Qyrus. Its essential usage is to assist users in finding locator values of elements on their applications. It also helps with verifying these locator values. If a user wants to verify that the value works on a given page of an application, it will show the user where it is on the page.
Jorell:
The way it works is a user can activate the mode on any given page of their application. Afterwards, any object they click on the device will be highlighted and the locator value populated in the step builder.
Milton:
The inspect mode gives a wide variety of locator types to use. Given the values are present for the selected object, Qyrus will provide XPaths, names, among other typical and standard value types.
Inspect mode already seems like an interesting feature from those statements alone. Qyrus seeks to make testing easier for everyone at every step of the testing process. We asked the group to tell us more about the impact we see from using inspect mode.
What is inspect mode’s overall impact on the testing process?
Jorell:
Inspect mode really only impacts test building, as it doesn’t have too much to do with test execution or reporting.
Milton:
I agree, overall, it helps reduce the amount of effort required to build these tests. Instead of having to manually inspect the XML of the app, you can now just use this built-in feature while you’re test building! No interruptions at all, whatsoever and I can easily choose any attribute.
How might inspect mode help testers, developers, and business technologists? What value can this feature bring?
Milton:
I’d say that in general, this feature is much more targeted towards testers and developers. However, business technologists would be able to much more easily navigate and even build simple tests quickly and ensure accessibility standards are met. Like we mentioned earlier, it simplifies test building greatly.
Brett:
For testers, we’ve already mentioned how it could be useful in their test building activities.
Jorell:
Developers also will find use in using inspect mode. Where it really starts to come into play is when we have multiple versions of an application. Developers could use this to inspect the applications and the elements within. That way, they can verify locators the different versions of their applications.
Inspect mode certainly has its strengths. Already seeing how much value this simple feature can bring, we wanted to learn more about exactly how this feature evolved the process. We wanted to know a bit more about how something similar would have been achieved before the introduction of this feature.
Does the same or similar functionality exist without Qyrus, and how do competitors address similar problems?
Brett:
So, yes, there are similar things out there to our inspect mode. However, none come close to the holistic experience from speed to the depth of information that you would receive on Qyrus. Most other similar features aren’t as complete as ours. One example is giving visual feedback in the form of highlighting the element on the live device stream. Another would be the automatic detection of multiple usable locator value types.
Milton:
And, Qyrus easily transfers those values over to the step builder, as well for quick automation. This allows us to take this one feature and incorporate it with others to help form that holistic test automation experience on Android and iOS devices from building to execution to reporting.
How do you see inspect mode impacting day-to-day operations across organizations?
Jorell:
We mentioned this a bit earlier, but essentially it would change how testers currently get these values completely. Originally, testers would have to manually comb through the XML tree and even create XPaths manually in order to get these values. This would involve a lot of back-and-forth between the testing app, the testing platform/framework, and the actual executions/reporting.
Brett:
And, 3rd party tools aren’t needed anymore in order to inspect elements on an application. Everything being integrated into a single platform brings a lot of bonuses. As Jorell said, you’ll see a lot less back-and-forth and in general higher productivity.
With the conclusion of this week’s Feature Friday, the beginning of the end – the weekend that is – starts. Enjoy it while you can, because it seems that the only thing that travels faster than light itself is weekends! So, it’s Friday, time to go out and make stories for Monday!
