Create UI tests

- [Narrator] Visual Studio App Center contains a mobile automated testing platform that represents the replacement for Xamarin Test Cloud. This platform is used to exercise mobile applications and is particularly good for running smoke test to ensure your application behaves the same way from release to release. This is particularly useful when the application behave differently from device to device. You may not own hundreds of different devices to test your app on, but VSAC does. We could even test different versions of the operating system on the same model of device.

Currently, the VSAC suite only supports Android and iOS similar to Xamarin Test Cloud. VSAC apps or other platforms like UWP won't show the test option. The Visual Studio App Center testing platform supports several different testing frameworks from a variety of different platforms. These are the platforms that supports. Appium is an open source testing framework. The Visual Studio App Center team recommends this framework be used by organizations that are already familiar with Appium.

Or for organizations that know the Selenium framework. For these cases, it could be a good way to make non-Xamarin cross platform test. Calabash is a Microsoft framework. With it being such, you may think it would be pushed by the VSAC team, but that does not seem to be the case. While Visual Studio App Center does support it, it does not appear to be highly recommended option. Espresso is the Native Android automated testing framework. If you are just creating Native Android apps, this may be a good choice.

Xamarin.UITest was made by the Xamarin team. It is a way to write test using C sharp. Because of this, it may be a good option for Xamarin apps in general as the language is the same. Finally, XUI Test is good for doing Native iOS testing. It may be worth looking at for single platform Native iOS apps. Visual Studio App Center test are started from the command line. There is a command line interface that needs to be installed in order to use them.

This command line interface can be retrieved via npm package. These test can be tied to VSAC builds using custom scripts as a CLI's installed on the build server. If you are using Visual Studio team service builds, a new custom build task should be created to make it easy to call VSAC test from custom builds set up for that platform.