Flutter fundamentals you need to know
Characteristics of Testing Flutter Applications
- Flutter Architecture: All elements are widgets. This simplifies testing of both interface and functionality, ensuring consistency throughout the application.
- Cross-Platform Capability: Significant time savings can be achieved by testing the application once for multiple platforms. Platform-specific functionalities are tested separately on iOS and Android, while everything else is tested on one platform.
- Specific Testing Tools: Flutter provides its own tools for testing widgets and integration, such as FlutterDevTools.
Testing Challenges and Solutions in Flutter Applications
When testing UI/UX variances across platforms, we often encounter these issues:
- Animation glitches: Pay close attention to transitions and scrolling, particularly on iOS devices.
- Gesture functionality for screen closures and swiping.
- Proper display of system dialog windows.
Flutter DevTools
That’s how the interface looks like in Flutter DevTools
Integrating golden tests into the development process.
- Golden tests are special test scenarios that record the expected outcomes of application execution.
Automation Implementation
- Flutter Compatibility: Our tests should seamlessly integrate with Flutter, so go for tools that are Dart-friendly, such as Selenium, Patrol, integration_test (formerly Flutter Driver), and flutter_gherkin libraries.
- Cross-Platform Functionality: Flutter knows no bounds, so ensure your framework works smoothly on both Android and iOS.
- Compatibility with CI/CD: For speed and convenience, ensure the framework aligns well with Jenkins, GitLab, and other CI/CD tools.
- Industry Popularity: Choose a framework with a robust community presence.
Ultimately, we greatly slashed the time spent on regression testing by using Appium. Previously, our team's full regression took up to 90 hours, but after automation, it dropped to 33 hours. On average, each test now runs in about 1.5 minutes. Approximately 10% of defects were caught through automated testing.
Parameterizing and optimizing test scenarios allowed us to cut down the number of test cases from 1334 to 483 — more than halving our initial count! Parameterization made our tests more flexible, adapting them to different conditions. This increased our efficiency in resource allocation, letting us to dedicate more attention to new features and enhancements.
An end-to-end test across 6 pages takes only about a minute and a half to complete.