Test a navigation app without leaving the room

One of the biggest challenges in mobile testing is testing a navigation app. While it is common to find testers and developers going on a "test drive" to test the app, some teams even travel between cities for this purpose. Automating testing on a navigation app is even more complicated because you cannot build automated tests on “moving" devices.

This article demonstrates how to test a navigation app and explains how to create a test automation script that injects routing data into the device. 

The following video shows the automation script running against the device.

To generate routing data:

1. Open Google Maps, set up the route between two addresses, and then copy the URL.

2. Go to http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/convert_input, set the output format to GPX, and paste the link into the URL field.

3. Click Convert to get the GPX file and copy it to your local machine.

4. Use the following code to read the data from the GPX file and inject it to the device.

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   package GPS;
   import java.io.File;
   import java.io.IOException;
   import java.util.AbstractList;
   import java.util.LinkedList;
   import java.util.ListIterator;
   import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
   import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
   import javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException;
   import org.w3c.dom.Document;
   import org.w3c.dom.Element;
   import org.w3c.dom.Node;
   import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;
   import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
   import com.perfectomobile.selenium.MobileCoordinatesLocation;
   import com.perfectomobile.selenium.MobileDriver;
   import com.perfectomobile.selenium.MobileLocation;
   import com.perfectomobile.selenium.api.IMobileDevice;
   public class GPSTest {
       static LinkedList<String> locations = new LinkedList<>();
       public GPSTest() {
       }
       public static void main(String[] args) {
           readData();
           // connect to Perfecto Mobile 
           MobileDriver PMdriver = new MobileDriver();
           //select a device 
           IMobileDevice device = PMdriver.getDevice("57AF4ED9");
           
           // loop over the GPS data and inject it to the device
           ListIterator<String> listIterator = locations.listIterator();
           while (listIterator.hasNext()) {
                MobileLocation location1 = new             MobileCoordinatesLocation(listIterator.next());
               device.setLocation(location1);
               try {
                   Thread.sleep(100);
               } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                   // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                   e.printStackTrace();
               }
           }
       }
       public static void readData() {
           try {
               // use the GPX file 
               File f = new File ("C:\\GPS\\home_work.xml");
               DocumentBuilderFactory dbFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
               DocumentBuilder dBuilder = dbFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
               Document doc = dBuilder.parse(f);
               NodeList nList = doc.getElementsByTagName("trkpt");
               for (int temp = 0; temp < nList.getLength(); temp++) {
                   Node nNode = nList.item(temp);
                   if (nNode.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE) {
                       Element eElement = (Element) nNode;
                       locations.add(eElement.getAttribute("lat")+","+ eElement.getAttribute("lon"));
                   }
               }
           } catch (SAXException e) {
               // TODO Auto-generated catch block
               e.printStackTrace();
           } catch (IOException e) {
               // TODO Auto-generated catch block
               e.printStackTrace();
           } catch (ParserConfigurationException e) {
               // TODO Auto-generated catch block
               e.printStackTrace();
           }
       }
   }