Mobile Application Market is gaining so much popularity now. With so many innovations happening in the field of mobile technology, mobile application testing is becoming a very essential part of the Software Development Life Cycle.

Excellent quality and highly efficient application have become a great challenge. To meet this challenge in a fruitful way, thorough and repeated testing of the system is required. Thorough testing can ensure that the application runs smoothly and meets user expectation. Effective test strategy and a combination of manual and automated testing tools are required to ensure a high-quality app.

Automated tests increase effectiveness and productivity and help maximum code coverage. Automated testing is sometimes considered as high cost, but if utilized effectively with balanced manual testing, the end result is overwhelming.

Why Test Automation?

There are many advantages to using Test Automation. It is fast and can be efficiently used for repeated testing. It can quickly find out the defects that occur due to the code changes thus, ensuring stability to the system. Repetition of tests can be effectively achieved using automated testing.

What is MonkeyTalk?

MonkeyTalk is one such automation tool used for efficient functionality testing of iOS and Android mobile applications. It is a cross-platform testing tool that record and playback functional test suites for iOS and Android applications running on real devices, emulators or simulator. Monkey Talk supports both native and hybrid iOS and Android apps.

MonkeyTalk has basically three components:

• MonkeyTalk IDE – is an Eclipse-based tool that helps in the record, playback, manage, edit test suites for iOS and Android apps.
• MonkeyTalk Agent – are the libraries that must be included in the mobile application under test. These Agents help the application to record and play MonkeyTalk commands.
• MonekyTalk Scripts – describe different activities that need to be performed while testing.

Benefits of MonkeyTalk tool

• A free, Open Source and simple to use tool.
• Can be used for both iOS and Android applications.
• Easy to understand and learn.
• Testers need not be expert programmers to use the tool.
• Support almost all iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod etc.) and Android devices, either tethered or over the network.
• Unlike other automation tools, MonkeyTalk uses Object-based recording. Object-based scripting is more flexible and unbreakable when compared to Image-based scripting.
• Touch and gesture-based operations are easily captured by this tool. Actions like swipe, drag, move etc. can be efficiently recorded and played back.
• MonkeyTalk is a cross-platform tool. For logically identical apps, MonkeyTalk commands recorded in one OS can be played in another OS.

Limitations of MonkeyTalk

• Mobile app under test must be instrumented with MonkeyTalk Agent which means access to source code is required or help from the developer is needed. Also, 3rd party apps (like Camera, Map etc.) cannot be tested as the source code is not available.
• Currently, it can be used only for iPhone and Android applications testing.

Conclusion

MonkeyTalk is a simple yet tremendously powerful test automation tool for iOS and Android applications.  There are so many exciting things yet to happen in MonkeyTalk world and with all the upcoming features to test desktop apps, flex mobile apps, more reliable tests for game engines of mobile games etc., MonkeyTalk has a great future ahead of it!

– Susan B John