In today’s blog we’re going to do minimal setup for an iOS device and TestComplete. When we’re done today, we will be able to see the device in the Object Browser, but won’t be able to do much with it yet. As of this writing, TestComplete requires that iOS apps are instrumented before we can test on them. The lion’s share of the work will happen instrument an iOS app starting on the 17^th.

Install iOS Drivers

On the PC where TestComplete will run, get the iOS drivers you’ll need by installing iTunes (download is here). Leave iTunes running.

Setup TestComplete

If you haven’t already, verify that you have the Mobile module enabled under TestComplete’s File > Install Extensions menu option. If you don’t see the Mobile category, re-run the installation to choose it.

Add a button to show TestComplete’s Mobile Screen emulator. To add the button, right-click the toolbar and select Customize… from the context menu. Select the Commands tab, the Mobile category and drag Show Mobile Screen to your toolbar. You should also add the Run Mobile Troubleshooter command.

Physical Devices – iOS

On the iOS device, configure the recommended settings for testing. It’s no fun testing a moving target, so these settings will help keep the device display as static as possible.

• Settings > General > Auto Lock: Never
• Settings     > Display and Brightness: The minimum setting to keep battery drain from exceeding the power supplied by USB. I’d recommend disabling the Auto-brightness feature so that image appearance stays constant.
• Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion: On.

Then connect your device to the PC’s USB port. The device will prompt “Trust this Computer?” Click the Trust button to complete the connection.

Back at the iTunes app, you should see a little mobile icon in the menu.

Click the mobile icon to show device details. As you can see below, I have the very most modren iPhone ever, the coveted iPhone 4. It may be a couple-five years old, but it’s running iOS 9.2 and works fine for our purposes.

Find the Serial Number part of the screen. What we really want is the UDID. Click the Serial Number and iTunes will page between several different identifiers.

Note the UDID for future use. You will need it when we prepare an iOS app for instrumentation.

In the TestComplete Object Browser, you should see the iOS mobile device in the tree.

Wrap Up

In this installment, we did the initial setup of an iOS device and saw the device show in the Object Browser. We won’t be able to do much with the device until we instrument an iOS app. Watch this space for more on instrumenting apps starting the 14th.

Tomorrow we’ll look at testing Android apps on emulators and virtual machines. See you then.

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