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Typically I find that nearly all my most important test cases for iPhone development revolve around UI testing rather than business logic or data testing. I'm not very familiar with automated UI testing in the XCode environment. Can someone point me to a good tutorial or book?

UPDATE
This question was written several years ago and UI testing has come a long way since then. Using the UI Automation is still an option, but the KIF Framework is a much better solution for functional testing now, IMO.

From KIF's github page:

KIF, which stands for Keep It Functional, is an iOS integration test framework. It allows for easy automation of iOS apps by leveraging the accessibility attributes that the OS makes available for those with visual disabilities.

KIF builds and performs the tests using a standard XCTest testing target. Testing is conducted synchronously in the main thread (running the run loop to force the passage of time) allowing for more complex logic and composition. This also allows KIF to take advantage of the Xcode 5 Test Navigator, command line build tools, and Bot test reports.

memmons
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3 Answers3

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Your best bet will be to use the UI Automation instrument that debuted with iOS 4.0. This can be scripted to test out many aspects of your user interface.

Apple provides a great introduction to this tool in the video for the WWDC 2010 session 306 - "Automating User Interface Testing with Instruments". I demonstrate how to set up scripts and do testing in the video for the "Testing" session of my advanced iOS development course on iTunes U. My notes on UI Automation from that class, including sample scripts, can be found here.

Additionally, you might want to look at James Turner's article "How to use UIAutomation to create iPhone UI tests" and Alex Vollmer's "Working with UIAutomation".

Brad Larson
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What are you really trying to test? I agree that testing view interaction is important but find that I can usually construct a unit or integration test which tests the view or the view and it's controller to validate this behavior without attempting to drive the entire app via the UI.

For example http://blog.carbonfive.com/2010/03/10/testing-view-controllers/ has examples of tests which test that UIKit views are bound to IBActions or have appropriate delegate's and that a controller responds to those action or delegate messages appropriately. There's no need to actually drive a UIButton or UITableView since I'm willing to trust that those classes actually work and instead only need to test my use and configuration of them.

For custom view components you can send UIResponder messages directly in your tests and assert that they behave as expected, again without driving the entire UI.

Can you provide an example of the sort of behavior you want to test?

Jonah
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This link could be helpful take a look https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/InstrumentsUserGuide/UsingtheAutomationInstrument/UsingtheAutomationInstrument.html

gaurav bhardwaj
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