Test Automation with Perfecto

Perfecto is one of the most sought-after cloud platforms to achieve continuous testing and accelerate delivery of any software product, which can be web, mobile or IoT apps.

In this blog, we would be focusing on mobile testing (manual and automation)

Now, here a question arises:

What is the need of “Perfecto Mobile,” when we have real devices/simulators and appium to automate our tests?

We all know that Perfecto mobile is built on top of appium. But this question can be answered by doing a comparative analysis of appium and Perfecto mobile.

Before diving into comparative analysis lets first see what perfecto has to offer to stakeholders.

Perfecto offers options for Manual Testing, Test Automation, always available private/public/onprem Cloud Test Lab, OCR technology, Perfecto connect, Desktop Web, Dev Tunnel, XCUITest, Espresso, Performance, Device monitoring, etc.

Comparative analysis

Parameter	Appium	Perfecto
Language/Support	Only for test automation. Language of coding Java, Ruby, Python, C#, PHP etc.	Provides a Cloud GUI interface for Manual Testing and Test Automation The language of coding Java, Ruby, Python, C#, PHP etc.
Usage	Appium can be used to execute the test cases for appium only	Tool for Functional automation Tool for performance automation and Real-Device Monitoring Perfecto can act as Cloud-based mobile test lab and can be used to execute the test cases for multiple tools like Appium, Selenium, QTP, JMeter, Selenium, Microsoft Visual Studio etc.
Cost	Open Source	Expensive https://www.perfectomobile.com/plans-pricing
Platforms	Android and iOS devices	Mobile: Android, iOS and WP8 devices Web: Chrome and Firefox browsers
Apps	Native, Hybrid and Mobile Web	Native, Hybrid and Mobile Web
Reporting	Need to rely on external reporting such as testNG, extent Report etc.	Provides in-house recording that includes step wise logging and video recording of executed tests
Image / text identification	No	Supports identification of image and text using OCR
Barcode scanning	No	Yes, through image injection
Response time	Fast	Bit slow due to remote device interaction

Some of the problems solved using Perfecto that appium couldn’t:

• While doing automation of website on mobile browser, we encountered a popup (OK/CANCEL) which was not identified by appium. This problem was easily solved using perfecto OCR functionality.
• Our tests involved scanning of barcode. Appium does not have capability to do so. Perfecto easily does this with the help of image injection.
• Scroll to functionality of appium was not stable for devices / OSs. We needed to scroll to an element from list and then click on it.  The scroll functionality used to behave differently on different devices, meaning the scroll length was not constant and the element may or may not appear with same amount of scrolling. Perfecto provides inbuilt stable functionality of scrolling.
• Perfecto handles OS level interactions as well. For examole: clearing of cache on iOS devices by opening Settings ->Safari->Clear cache. Appium does not provide this capability.
• Perfecto is independent of underlying OS when it comes to setting up appium server. While automating with Appium we need a lot of configuration for running automation on windows and Mac. On Perfecto we just need to provide a cloud URL and that’s it. No need to explicitly configure and start appium server.

In a nutshell, Perfecto performs mobile and browser test automation more efficiently and eliminate costly QA bottlenecks.