Abstract

Selenium introduced the 'find by XPath' locator strategy from the very beginningof the WebDriver protocol. In the context of a web page this makes sense --- HTMLis (ideally, at least) XML, & XPath is an XML querying language --- & it is often the best way to specify particular elements easily. Dynamic pages complicates the matter but the search strategy remains no less useful.

But in a world increasingly dominated by mobile devices, the situation changesdrastically. There is no prior XML representation of the native view for any mobile vendor. Neither iOS nor Android provide a way to easily search usingXPath.

This talk will cover the XPath locator strategy in general, but concentrate on how, under the hood, it is handled for mobile application testing, & why this leads to strange speed & accuracy issues. It will finish with some recommendations for other strategies better suited to the mobile domain.

Presented by

Isaac Murchie is a senior software engineer at Sauce Labs, where he is also thetechnical lead on the Appium project. As a core contributor to that project, he has been responsible for implementing the support for modern iOS automation.

Agenda

6:30PM - Doors open

7:00PM - Presentations begin

8:30PM - Networking

9:00PM - Doors close

Special thanks to Boxed for hosting this event!