3X: How to Speed Up Your Appium Test

 So I know I've mentioned this quite a bit in the previous session of getting started with our Appium scripts and running our Appium scripts. How Kobiton makes use of Kobitons own in-house built Appium server called XIUM.

So XIUM can actually run your Appium scripts up to three times faster than standard Appium server. So let's take a moment to review XIUM and how it is that Kobiton was able to achieve this. One thing to start is that Kobiton. Recognizes the efforts being made in automation engineering, especially when you're at the hands of an open source framework. So Appium is a great solution. However, it does come in its own caveat of being much slower than the native frameworks as we, as well as being a bit more brittle than the native frameworks as well. So at Kobiton we wanted to offer features and functionality to really help in your Appium scripting so you can still make use of this great framework, but not but not have to be at its cost.

So quick recap. A user can do just that by getting started on Appium by making use of the Appium script generator and exporter. This significantly reduces scripting development time so you can set it as a base for your Appium script and or you can drill even deeper into your Appium script. Now that you have that foundation, kind of that UI are automated for you and available to you in less than 5 minutes. So looking at the kind of grand scheme of things, so let's say it takes you 2 hours to set up your environment and develop a script, and there are 100 test cases in a regression suite. So that's 2 hours of a user's time. That's around five weeks of just getting your regression suite automated.

The Appium gen export with it taking only a couple minutes to set up a script after a manual session, leaving automation engineers far more time to work on other automation efforts. So instead of having to take you 2 hours to set up and develop a script, here, you have it available to you in just a couple of minutes and then you can go ahead and get moving on to the next test case to automate. So really helps expedite that automation process. You're not left having to create scripts from scratch every single go.

So XIUM. What is XIUM? XIUM is, as I mentioned before, XIUM is Kobiton's in-house Appium server to run Appium scripts and it can run your Appium scripts up to three times faster. So here in this in this photo or in this diagram, we have the execution times of the native frameworks as well as Appium so if you have UI Automator. You have espresso, you can you can notice how much faster they are than Appium. And then here with Xium coming in around really once again be able to run your Appium scripts three times faster. It can even be run faster than the native frameworks themselves. So when we're looking at Appium and we're understanding that yes, the execution time can be a bit lengthy, as that's just Appium's logic under the hood, essentially. Kobiton has other features to kind of help combat that slowness by offering XIUM.

With Xium what Kobiton did is Appium being open source. There have been a lot of commits to the framework, a lot of changes and a lot of kind of code bloat, if you will. And so what Kobiton has done is Kobiton has stripped all that unnecessary code, essentially removed that code bloat and really streamline the server from end point to end point. So that is how Xium is able to run your Appium scripts up to three times faster.

So what I'd like to do is just take a brief moment to showcase, to demo the difference between running a script on Appium server and running that same script on Xium. So what I have here is that same simple script that we created the manual session. I have expert that Appium script. And now what I, what I am doing is I have the first run I have appointed to a device that I know is going to be using the Appium server and we're actually going to time, the execution time. And then after that we're on the same script, but on a device that's making use of XIUM and we can compare the two execution times.

So with that, I'm going to go ahead and just start running the script. And we can begin timing it.

All right. Well, because we did get a failure, but that's okay. I just wanted to showcase kind of the start up and execution time. So it took about a minute just for this script to initialize and begin running. Now I'm going to take a moment and actually point this to XIUM and one will actually see a little bit more stability with it. And then two, it will be much faster as well and executing.

So once it hits, we'll start recording.

Okay.

Notice how 15 seconds is, and we've already initialize the script to run on the real device.

Here. It took 34 seconds, so we had a more than a minute and 12 seconds using the Appium server and in fact actually failed, even though given the same devices. And then here running on Xium, we see it running completely in a fraction of the time. So that is Xium.