Telerik Mobile Testing is an automated testing solution for native, hybrid, and web apps. To discover more about this product, I would recommend reading Robert Shoemate’s blog post entitled, Introducing Telerik Mobile Testing, where he details our motivations for building the product along with its technical underpinnings. In this post, I’ll explain how to configure devices to integrate as test agents with this environment. As an example, we’ll explore to configure an Android device as test agent on a Windows machine. However, if you’re interested in learning how to perform testing against a native iOS app, make sure to check out Anthony Rinaldi’s blog post entitled, Telerik Mobile Testing – iOS Case Study.

Before I go ahead and show you how to add a device as Test Agent, let us try to understand few fundamental questions. For example,

• What is a Test Agent?
• Why we need Test Agent?
• Why we need to add a real device as Test Agent?

Test Agent is a place in which you run the test. It could be a computer, emulator, simulator, browser or even a background process. Test Agent can be seen as an environment in which test gets executed.

Any serious mobile application should get tested before launching to various stores. As a tester you should or rather must test application on real devices. For instance consider Android platform, it has more than 1000 variations of devices and any serious Android application should be tested on some of them.  To test application on device you need to add them as Test Agent. Same challenges goes with iOS app as well. They run on various version of operating systems and you should test applications against almost all versions of OS.

Telerik Mobile Testing allows you to add devices as Test Agent. You can add any kind of Android or iOS devices and run test on them. You can add devices as Test Agent without jail breaking them and only requirement is that devices (Test Agent) and Test Runner should be connected to same Wi-Fi networks.

Telerik Mobile Testing allows you to add real devices and emulator as Test Agent at the same time. So any testing scenario in which application should be tested on device and emulator at the same time can be possible here.

 

Following are the steps you need to follow to set up an Android device (Samsung Galaxy S3) as Test agent. However almost same steps you need to follow to add iOS app.

Step 1

In order to test native and hybrid apps on a device, you need to download and install the Telerik Mobile Testing companion app for iOS (App Store) or Android (Google Play). Once installed, the app will appear on your device as follows:

 

Step 2

Download and extract the Telerik Mobile Testing archive to your machine. Navigate to Telerik Mobile Testing folder and run start_win.exe. This will launch the Test Runner with its default configuration and open a browser window that points to the Test Runner execution environment.

 

 

It will launch Test Runner in browser.

 

As of now you there is no Agent added to the Test Runner.

Step 3

Launch the Telerik Mobile Testing companion app on your device:

When launched, the app will be not connected to the Test Runner. To connect it to Test Runner, click on setting in Application. You will find setting option in top right.

In Setting you need to provide IP Address of machine in which Test Runner is running. You can find IP address of machine by running ipconfig command on command prompt in Windows devices. Ensure that you have provided port address as 8081.

Once you have provided Host as IP Adress of machine on which Test Runner is running (You can provide host name also) and port address as 8081, click on Connect to connect device with Test Runner.

On successful connection you will get message in App as this device is connected and ready to run tests.

Step 4

Now you have device connected as Test Agent. To view it go back to Test Runner and click on Refresh Agents. You will find device has been added to Test Runner as Test Agent

Now you can select device as Test Agent and run the Application Test on real device. I hope this post will help you in setting up device as Test Agent with ease and explain you why you need to test application on real devices. Thanks for reading.