ITA Gets Smarter: Added App Support, More Visual Verification, and More

Kobiton’s Intelligent Test Automation engine is the industry’s first and only scriptless option for building, running, and scaling mobile test automation. In our last release, we introduced a brand new set of features to ITA, including Open Appium Export (free stuff!), Data-driven testing, and more. In this release, ITA has gotten even smarter, and now offers:

• Support for hybrid mobile applications
• Added elements to our Data Driven Testing capability
• Additional visual verification and remediation abilities

READ THE RELEASE NOTES

CHECK OUT THE NOVEMBER 2020 PLATFORM UPDATE BLOG

Support for hybrid applications

Since we released ITA, it has has been limited to creating, scaling, and running script-less automation for native applications. While this has been a HUGE time-saver for Kobiton users (i.e. we have teams planning to use ITA to do what once took 1.5 years and do it in two weeks), we always knew that ITA would need to support more to meet the needs of the enterprise team. 

That’s why, in this release, we have taught ITA how to take the same time and money saving automation ability and apply it across your hybrid applications. This is going to save the tester a lot of time, and make the executive really happy that their team chose Kobiton.

Improving our new Data-Driven Testing engine

In our last release, we introduced a brand new Data-Driven testing engine into ITA. We built DDT so that your teams would have the ability to intelligently parameterize your tests with mock data-sets to ensure that your automated tests are providing adequate coverage.

With this release, we’ve made DDT better and more comprehensive. You can now use DDT to simulate datasets and values associated with your application’s date picker. 

You can now also tell ITA which devices and which ITA-revisits that you want to implement your DDT parameters against. This gives you added control and allows more flexibility in running DDT-powered tests.

We’ve also built in assertion capabilities to DDT. This allows you to implement checkpoints to make sure that your ITA-generated Test Cases are being executed exactly how you want them given the datasets and values you want to test against.

Do even more with our Open-Appium Export

In our last release, we broke vendor-lock. Our new Open-Appium Export capability introduced the ability to take what ITA made and export it as 100% open-standard Appium so that you could do whatever you wanted with it. In this release, we’ve made this free stuff even cooler with added support for new test actions:

• Virtual Keyboard 
• Device Softkey 
• Rotate 
• Retry method 
• Check device availability

This means that your teams can better use ITA to generate a base Appium script for further tweaking, plugging in to a CI/CD pipeline (think a script to tell Jenkins to kick-off), or even running against a device provider…however, we think that you’ll like Kobiton’s holistic Mobile Experience platform (and our devices and deployment) a lot more.

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Not just functional, and not just visual

That’s right. With Kobiton, you get both. And, in this release, we’ve added an entire new layer to the visual component of your mobile testing. In our last release, we introduced new visual text assertions that helped ITA find and notify you of any discrepancies around color and positioning of text. Now, teams can use ITA to automatically pinpoint, across your different devices and form factors, exactly where there may be visual anomalies associated with layout and structure of other items on the screen, such as blocks.

https://videos.sproutvideo.com/embed/ac9cd7ba1413e2c225/27c55096bea8a833

This is just another step that your teams can take toward delivering defect-free (functionally and visually) releases and perfect mobile experiences.

But, that’s not all…

A sneak peek: we’ll tell you what beautiful is

This is a major release for ITA, but its nothing compared to what we have coming soon. While we’ll be dropping teasers and hints over the next several weeks (stay tuned) about the next big ITA leap, we wanted to give you a sneak peak into one piece of the next big thing in Mobile Experience: Project Nova.

You already know that ITA is able to drive both functional and visual verification and validation testing. However, we are taking the industry a step–rather multiple steps–forward. As of this release, we’ve begun to introduce brand new AI and ML technology that’s helping ITA learn how to compare what your teams have built, what you all are testing, and how it compares with the best performing and most beautiful applications out there. 

What does this mean for your visual validation testing?

Visual validation works when you have an AI-fueled tool that can compare proposed UI’s to a baseline. While we’ve already made baseline comparison way better than the early visual validation tools such as Applitools, (our functional testing as the harness eliminates the need for taking screenshot after screenshot for capturing baselines), we’re now going to help you get to the baseline in the first place. 

While we can’t give away any more details for now, be on the lookout for more sneak peaks into what we are building. Trust me, you’ll be as excited as we are.