Cross Platform Network Calls Automation

Varun Bhal, Lead Software Engineer

Adobe Systems, Noida

Abstract

• As we are moving towards cloud technology, most of the products and web apps involve background network calls in their workflows nowadays

• Testing these calls give hard time to the tester, esp. the calls which are used to capture analytics, workflows registration, background update checks, etc. because you can’t see their impact on the UI

• Web proxy tools like Fiddler, Charles, etc. are used to test such calls, but it’s a manual process and not all tools are cross platform

• Tracing SSL requests (https calls) is again difficult with such tools and mostly supported in browsers only

• Tshark is a command line utility which can be used to sniff http/https network calls and can be easily hooked with any automation framework

Types on network calls:• Impact on UI

• E.g. : Dynamic dialogs, advertisements, notification services, etc.• Easy to test and validate• Easy to automate the UI test cases

•• No impact on UI

• E.g. : Analytics calls, workflow registrations, background update checks, etc.• Need to sniff network traffic to validate the calls• Manual process• Difficult to automate across different platforms• Difficult to sniff and decrypt SSL requests

Solution : Use Tshark

• Command line network sniffing utility• Comes bundled with Wireshark – open source network protocol analyzer

tool• Supports various filters while capturing or reading the packets• Supports SSL requests decryption• Can be easily hooked with any automation framework

Author Biography

Varun is a Lead Software engineer at Adobe with 5.5 years of industry experience in automation and tools development. He is a part of Flash Runtime team at Adobe and have exposure of working in installation, deployment and runtime test automation across different platforms, including Mobile technology. This is where he came across with this practice and got successful in implementing it in automation.

THANK YOU!