Connected devices market shows prolific growth within past few years. As more connected devices enter the market, more companies are focused on entering the market faster without compromising product quality. This is where device manufacturers have to ensure that the devices are completely tested in a short sprint. Such scenarios require open-source test automation to speed up the testing process and accommodate the release cycle.
Testing IoT devices is simply called IoT testing. Even the most meticulous testers can make mistakes with monotonous manual tests, but automated tests can perform accurate and quick tests every time, and the results are also recorded. When the code changes, automated tests run automatically to notify the developer if the source code fails. In addition, simulations can be run using automated testing with virtual user interactions using application software and the network web.
According to Markets and Markets, the IoT test market will grow from $ 302.9 million in 2016 to $ 1.378 billion in 2021 with a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35.4 from 2016 to 2021.
When it comes to test automation, open-source test automation tools are more popular because they don’t require expensive licenses, are highly customizable, can be virtualized, and provide better support and collaboration.
There can be a myriad of devices with different capabilities in the IoT ecosystem. These devices send large amounts of data. These vulnerabilities are not easy to detect due to the possibility of data leakage, unauthorized data acquisition, or data loss. However, if you need to address these issues, you should implement an appropriate streamlined testing process to increase the reliability of your system.
Why open-source test automation?
Many developers and QA teams are already moving to open-source test automation. Apart from the features mentioned above, the test cycle using open-source tools is significantly shorter than traditional test tools. Most companies want to get to the market faster and need shorter test cycles.
The quality engineer needs to test IoT applications on a variety of devices. Open-source test automation also allows you to run parallel tests across multiple devices. Looking at test case generation, they are also reusable, so engineers can save more time writing test scripts. Therefore, all these aspects are important for IoT testing, which is why open-source tools are a good option for IoT test automation.
Advantages of Open–Source Test Automation for IoT
- Reduced Price
The main advantage of open-source test tools is that they reduce the total cost of ownership and require fewer hardware requirements compared to traditional test tools and methods. In addition, these test components are easy to reuse, highly scalable, and allow organizations to choose a flexible pricing model. Therefore, IoT development can be affordable for organizations.
- Highly Customizable
If you want to use the platform for a long time, you need to adapt it to your needs. You need to be able to find a solution or adopt a new solution from the community. Therefore, the major open-source tools provide samples, custom commands, extensions, performance changes, and plugins to customize the tool.
- Community Support
The support of the developer community for open-source tools can be very helpful in solving problems effectively. For example, Selenium is one of the most active open-source testing projects on the GitHub site. Apart from that, you’ll see thousands of “stars,” “folks,” “issues,” and hundreds of contributors and releases. This allows developers to interact with the community to resolve issues faster while gaining insights into the tool.
- Quick Testing
If everyone tries to reduce the time to market, the test cycle will be shorter. Shorter test cycles, faster setup, non-productivity updates, and tool deployment of open-source automation tools are the main benefits of open-source test automation as they reduce the overall time to market. This allows for rapid code changes, reduces duplication, and improves maintainability, facilitating endless competition for IoT development for deploying applications.
- Fix Defects Faster
Repeated automated test runs simplify debugging, but you can instantly see code changes and fix bugs and bugs quickly.
- Faster Delivery and Higher Quality
Repeated automated test runs simplify debugging, but you can instantly see code changes and fix bugs and bugs quickly.
- Language support
The open-source testing framework supports multiple languages as well as multiple platforms and browsers. That is Objective-C / Swift for iOS, and Java for Android. This makes testing humble and more convenient for all users.
The Famous Open-Source Test Automation Frameworks
- Selenium
Selenium is the leading open-source testing framework for test automation of web applications. Selenium IDE, is a rendering tool provided by the Selenium platform for generating functional tests without learning the test scripting language. It provides a test domain-specific language for creating tests in various programming languages such as Java, PHP, and C #.
- Robotium
Robotium is used to create automatic gray box tests for Android applications. The Robotium is only available for Android packages and is used for both application testing with unknown implementation details and application testing with known source code. This allows testers to create functional test scenarios and accept test scenarios for all other Android activities.
- Appium
Appium is an IoT testing framework for mobile native, web, and hybrid apps. Appium provides recording and playback options that allow users to track and keep a record of their tests. With cross-platform capabilities, software or hardware units can run the same on different platforms
- Espresso
Espresso testing provides an application program interface for creating test user interfaces for testing. This flows within an Android application that knows how to use the code that runs the application for more thorough testing of each element. Espresso is commonly used to create automation for white-box testing.
- XCUITest
XCUITest is Apple’s open-source test automation framework within the XCode integrated development environment. The test can be run in parallel on multiple devices using test reports that include videos, screenshots, and test logs. eInfochips has over 20 years of experience and expertise in quality engineering services. eInfochips uses IoT testing techniques and has a proven testing framework that provides end-to-end testing to maximize test coverage.
