Wednesday March 27, 2013

✦ Announcing My Book: Test iOS Apps With UI Automation

I’m quite excited to announce my new book, Test iOS Apps With UI Automation! You can get the first six chapters today as a beta ebook through the Pragmatic Programmers. They’re working with me to add more polish and we’ll release the final chapters in the coming weeks. If you spot a problem, let me know! Many thanks to them and specifically Brian Hogan, my editor, for helping me pull this off.

What’s this UI Automation?

UI Automation is a tool that lets you control your application as it runs on the simulator or a tethered device through a JavaScript API. It’s one of the many pieces of the Instruments analysis tool that comes with Apple’s SDK. You can use it to write acceptance tests to assert proper behavior for your app, and even use it to drive the boring and repetitive behavior needed to squash hard to replicate performance bugs.

And This Book Helps?

The documentation on UI Automation is…sparse, shall we say. There’s lots of detail there, but not a good description of patterns and paradigms to help you think about writing effective test suites for iOS applications.

That’s where this book comes in.

I share my experience with you and walk you though testing an actual application that uses Core Data, talks to external network services, and uses geolocation. I show you how to start testing with UI Automation in small chunks. By the end you’ll isolate the application from external dependencies, bootstrap the starting state, and run the entire behavior test suite from the command line.

You don’t need to install anything extra to get started, since UI Automation comes with Xcode and friends. Learn as you go and pull in third party resources as you need them.

Ooooo, So Where Do I Get It?

As mentioned above, the first six chapters are available today through the Pragmatic Programmer’s beta ebook program. Buy it and you’ll get free updates as I finish polishing the book. And we’re making sure the beta period extends past WWDC 2013 so I can keep it up to date after the new goodies are announced.

Thank you all for your support and encouragement. SQUASH ALL THE BUGS.