Over the last few weeks in-between Firefox for Android release cycle work, I have been bestowed on the interests of contributing to the Gaia UI automation efforts established from the Mozilla Web QA and Automation & Tools teams by assisting in writing, extending and building upon the available tests and APIs. Preliminary development of an extensive test suite of basic functional smoke-tests tests is underway.
Reviewing the available Gaia smoke-tests, the feasible test-cases can be written into Python based manifest-driven tests that are executed by Mozilla's own automation driver, Marionette. Sharing much of the same API as Selenium and Web Driver, it makes writing tests rather easy. For example, a first test I have written recently is able to launch, interact and assert content behaviors of HTML elements in the bundled Gaia music application with relative ease — afterall, each application is merely HTML.
Each test that is built upon the Marionette foundation utilizes a Python package named Gaiatest (available on PyPi here) that is in-fact based on Marionette. It is used specifically for writing tests against Gaia and has a growing variety of atomic Gaia related APIs such as: unlocking the device home-screen, toggling WiFi/cellular data, setting volume and interactions with other device settings, etc. For example, here is the current data_layer.js file where we can write functions that interact with accessible public interfaces from the variety of available WebAPI. In turn we can we abstract and create APIs for use in our tests (e.g, preliminary tests such as test_dialer.py disables device volume and soon to be test_browser.py where one can toggle WiFi and or celluar data).
I would encourage all those who are currently writing Gaia applications to try out Marionette and Gaiatest and to contribute to our UI automation efforts by writing well-tested tests to expand our current test-suite. The [Github][] repository is where all activity is at with chatter taking place on #appsqa on Mozilla IRC.
Further information on running Marionette tests can be read here alongside a README for installing and setting up Gaiatest.