I asked some time ago and am still puzzled for the lack of automation toolstacks, but I’m also curious, does anyone actually have an app that they support on chromebooks?
(Chromebook Automation control) archived
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We tried to run an Android app from our organization on Chromebook to take easy way to support the platform, but turns out, for certain features like querying networking information and device information, Chromebook’s Android runtime layer abstracts away the actual Chromebook networking stack so you don’t get access to the real info, you get info on a virtualized stack running within Chromebook. So not very useful there.
I don’t think many organizations build an app or widget specific to Chromebook. The documentation how to develop for it isn’t very intuitive and easy to find, thus I can see it would be the same automation wise.
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Thanks for the respond David. We have a customer in the education sector (and in others) but they are using them in schools all over and although our app is network state aware, I’m seeing the same kind of pain for testing. A total lack of automation tooling.
I will have to see if there are other ways to get out of doing manual testing in the new year. I guess I did choose the job that was always going to be hard.
These were the only things I found regarding automation around Chromebook/ChromeOS, not that much to go on. I’m guessing it’s a niche area of focus and folks don’t share that much about the subject publicly.
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/autotest/+/master/README.md
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-apps/c/-TPAbIYTjJY?pli=1
Yeah. I also found that group last activity was in 2017, which I find hard to believe is true. Platforms for all kinds of collaboration fragment and move, but practical software quality especially embedded work is just hidden. It’s not that specialised, it’s everywhere around us, but engineers have to learn on the job. Heck some of the web app testers don’t even talk much about what they do, but if you ask in a live chat, or go to a seminar, you can get some great pointers.
We sent half my team to DroidCon, 2 weeks ago, and they brought back some cool insights into testing tools on the platform, cannot wait for a chance to play with the things they found. You have to get out there to learn, so might try spot a Chromebook /ChromeOS event someplace to attend.
We sent half my team to DroidCon, 2 weeks ago, and they brought back some cool insights into testing tools on the platform, cannot wait for a chance to play with the things they found.
Would you mind sharing here or somewhere the insights they found? Would be good for the greater test community. But I understand if you can’t or don’t want to do so. Just thought I’d try and ask anyhow.
Heck some of the web app testers don’t even talk much about what they do, but if you ask in a live chat, or go to a seminar, you can get some great pointers.
I suppose that’s true to some extent and for any field/industry of testing. However, I would like to mention there is at least far more articles, blogs, videos from folks in the profession regarding web testing, mobile app testing, and desktop UI testing that you can find online.
It is unfortunate, we don’t have any pioneers offering their insights on niche industries/categories like ChromeOS/Chromebook testing. Or it’s also possible they aren’t allowed to share such info or that the work they did was highly customized for the organization they worked for.
The work we do is customised, and secret, yes but our strategy is not nor are the mistakes we made. All those are free to share and do not divulge IP. Oh, I’m very open about sharing specifics @daluu , I have been super busy and we have a closedown release, so I need to do some work and will update this later with the droidcon recordings which appear to be open to all web to view.
All the presentations (you have to hunt about for slide decks) the clips are well filmed but don’t always include the screen. https://www.droidcon.com/content/?filter_postyear=2023&filter_post_event_tag=droidcon-london
Scroll to bottom of page and keep tapping the “more” button till they all load. Ones I was most interested in are
- Practical ADB usage to enhance your life! - droidcon This one especially since it shows some shell remoting speed-optimisations I did not know about, and a few hacky ways to send inputs that can be useful in a pinch when something like webdriverIO is too heavweight a tool. Also some really good tips on how to fetch device metrics and state.
- Put Your Tests on a Diet:Testing the Behavior and Not the Implementation - droidcon
- Hitting a Gold Mine:How to Set the Gold Standard With Golden Tests - droidcon on using graphical screen compares
- A\B Test Best Practices and Fun Case Studies from Deliveroo - droidcon
Basically for ios and android targets we use a few ioS open sourced libs and components that let us read and also set device state and not rely on the expensive tools (time-expensive) to get devices into a good state. It’s a waste of time trying to get a webdriver to connect to a phone only to find later that the app won’t install or that the device lost wifi or is just not plugged in anymore, or even more fun is not the exact same phone or tablet factor you thought it was going to be. and since you want device logs when things die, and webdriver does not give you much help in that department, so imobiledevice and associated libs along with adb and the other tools in the same box are pretty good at getting quicker answers, and we should all use them. Early warnings for things become possible when you have a good clear visibility into a device.