Xcode provides a fully-featured, scriptable UI Testing framework. A key to using the framework is understanding its architecture and how to best leverage its capabilities.

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When you create a new project in Xcode, the new project wizard asks if you’d like to Include Unit Tests, and whether you’d like to Include UI Tests.

One might wonder — is a UI Test not a Unit test? If not, then what is it?

Actually, these checkboxes and their outcomes are primarily there to inform Xcode which targets to create within your project. Each checkbox, when checked, generates a different type of test target in your project.

The fundamental differences between an Xcode Unit Test and an Xcode UI Test:

The Apple iOS Simulator, which ships as part of Xcode, is a tool for developing and prototyping your mobile app. While the iOS Simulator can be used to test your app’s basic behaviour, it is severely limited as a testing platform. In order to effectively test your app across real world scenarios, it is essential to use real mobile devices. There are 2 ways to access Simulator through Xcode. Running Your iOS App. To run an application via a simulator, choose an iOS Simulator from Xcode Schema pop-up menu and click on Run. Launching Simulator Without Running an App. Control-click the Xcode icon in the Dock, and from the shortcut menu, choose Open Developer Tool. Problem: Ios simulator for mac without xcode. Solution: The Simulator app requires several other large directories from the Xcode distribution in order to work at all.

Unit Tests are used to test that source code generates expected results. For example: ensuring that a function, when passed a specific parameter, generates some expected result.
UI Tests test that a user interface behaves in an expected way. For example: a UI Test might programmatically tap on a button which should segue to a new screen, and then programmatically inspect whether the expected screen did load, and contains the expected content.

Both Unit Tests and UI Tests support full automation, and enable regression testing of applications over their lifecycle.

Generally speaking, an Xcode Unit Test exercises and evaluates your Swift code, but does not inspect the impact is has on the User Interface, while an Xcode UI Test evaluates the UI behavior in response to actions, but does notinspect your code.

As always, these are generalized statements that have exceptions. It is certainly possible to get some insight into the UI from a (code) Unit Test, and to get some insight into the state of your code objects from a UI Test. But the tools are designed to be used according to this generalized statement.

Before examining the architecture and implementation of UI Test, let’s take a look at a finished test in operation. The user story for this test is as follows:

On the first screen, the user can select a cell within a table view, which opens a second form showing the selected value in a label. The user can then key in a new value, in a text box beneath the original label. When the user subsequently returns to the first form, the new value will be shown in the Table View.

If a QA tester were to manually check this process they would do the following sequence:

Launch the app
Tap on a row
Observe the table view row text is on the second form when it loads
Type in a new value in the text field
Press the back button
Observe the value they typed has replaced the original text in the table view

The manual testing process would look as follows (this is an animated .gif — if using the Medium app, you may need to open this page in a browser to view the animation).

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could automate this process so our QA tester didn’t have to repeat this process manually before every release? That’s exactly what UI Testing is for — and we’ll walk through how to automate this test process!

Before digging into the code, it’s important to understand how the Xcode UI Test framework operates. By understanding how the UI Tests access and manipulates your UI components, you’ll be able to make your UI easy to build tests for.

As with Unit Tests (the ones that exercise your source code), XCode uses XCTest to run your UI Tests. But how does the XCTest code know how to inspect and manipulate the UI that you designed in Storyboards and/or Swift code?

To gain access to your UI at runtime, XCTest uses metadata exposed by iOS Accessibility. This is the same technology used to enable iOS to read your screen to blind and low vision users, for example. At runtime, XCTest iterates over your UI controls, looking for Accessibility properties such as accessibilityIdentifier and accessibilityLabel to find the UI components you’d like XCTest to tap on, change or inspect as part of your UI Test.

While it’s possible to design UI Tests without doing any preparation of Accessibility metadata in your app — and you’ll find many examples on the Internet that do this — you can maintain better control and predictability in UI Tests by planning for UI Tests in advance, and preparing Accessibility metadata in the UI. Similarly, if you’re retrofitting UI Tests to an existing application, you should consider retrofitting Accessibility metadata as part of the process.

Xcode’s UI Test suite provides an easy way to get started implementing a UI Test: the Record UI Test button.

To begin recording a UI Test:

Create a new UI Test function in the UI Test target source .swift file (assuming you created a UI Test target when you created your project — or added it later)
Place the editing cursor within the empty test function
Press the Record UI Test button below the source code editing pane

Xcode will compile and run the application using the debug device (i.e. simulator). Then, just walk through the test sequence on the simulator (or other debug device). When you’re finished, stop the debug session. Xcode will have created a set of commands to re-create the UI experience during the recording. In the case of the test sequence outlined above, the following code would be generated:

Great! Xcode has generated all the command needed to re-run the same UI Test process we did by hand. This is a boon to our test design productivity, and gives us a great start. But it’s not perfect, and not a production ready test yet. There are some deficiencies:

There are some messy aspects, such as the line let app2 = app. We wouldn’t have written the code this way ourselves — the app object created at line 1 obviously can be used throughout the test function.
The reference to staticTexts[“Fourth Row”] in line 2 of the function assumes that the contents of the UITableView cells will always be the same. What if it won’t? This is a case where preparing the Accessibility metadata can help make a more robust test. I’ll cover this shortly.
The auto-generated code causes the test to operate, but nothing here is evaluating whether the outcomes of the test were successful or not. Xcode can’t create this part of the test — we have to do this ourselves.

In Line 2 of the auto-generated code, Xcode inserted this line:

In english, this command means:

Within the array ofUITableView objects within the current UIView, find a UITable with the key MyTable. Then, search all the UILabel controls within that UITable and find a UILabel having a text value “Fourth Row”. Then tap on that UILabel.

There are two key references XCTest uses to find UI elements here:

The “Fourth Row”UILabel

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