Streamline Your UI Testing: A Step-by-Step Guide to Automation on WeTest UDT

Author: Baojian Shen

Senior Product Manager, Tencent WeTest

In today's fast-paced software development landscape, UI automation testing has transitioned from a luxury to an absolute necessity. It serves as the critical engine that enables teams to meet aggressive release schedules while maintaining product quality.

The core advantages of UI automation are clear:

• Accelerated Testing: Automate repetitive scenarios, freeing QA engineers to focus on complex exploratory testing
• Enhanced Accuracy: Eliminate human error while executing extensive test cases across multiple devices
• Reliable Regression: Ensure new features don't break existing functionality—essential for CI/CD pipelines
• Unmatched Scalability: Run tests simultaneously across numerous device and OS combinations

Despite these benefits, maintaining local device labs presents significant challenges—from device management to flaky tests and platform-specific complexities.

This is where the WeTest UDT platform makes all the difference, transforming automation from a complex burden into a seamless, cloud-native practice. In this blog, we'll briefly guide you through a complete UI automation demo on UDT cloud real devices, showing exactly how to create robust, scalable automated tests with ease.

1. Log in to the WeTest UDT platform

The first step is to access the platform and start a real device from the extensive cloud device lab.  

2. Upload and install the application

Once the device is ready, we directly upload and install the demo application (.apk file) onto the cloud device for testing.

3. Establish Connection & Develop Script

Copy the remote debugging command provided by the platform. Then, use WDB to connect locally to the cloud real device, establishing a stable bridge for control and data transfer.

Next, we start uiauto.dev and connect to the cloud real device, providing a powerful IDE for script development. Here, we begin to write the testing script code. A key step is to use uiautomator2 to connect to the cloud real device. The UDT_DEVICE_SERIAL variable can be used to identify the device number of the UDT platform's cloud real device, ensuring our script targets the correct device.

4. Initial Execution and App Launch

We then execute the test script and review the results. An output of device info indicates a successful connection. The script first needs to get the package name of the demo application (obtainable from the UDT platform or uiauto.dev) and then launch the demo application.

5. Automating Login and Form Interaction

Now, we automate the login flow. The script is designed to:

Locate the username element by text and trigger a click event, then input content.

Execute the test script and review the results to verify the input was successful.

Locate the password element by resource-id and trigger a click event, then input content.

Execute the test script and review the results again.

Finally, click the sign in button.

6. Handling Complex UI: Pop-ups and Scrolls

After logging in, we check the elements on the new page. The next action is to trigger the submit button without selecting the checkbox, which we expect will cause a failure.

After we execute the test script and review the results, the expected "Submit Failed" pop-up appears. We then check the elements of this pop-up and add logic to handle the pop-up in our script.

To complete the required action, the script must check the elements of checkbox option item3 and get its resource-id, then trigger a click event on the checkbox. Since the list is long, we add a swipe event to navigate and trigger a click event on the bottom checkbox option item19.

7. Final Validation and Reporting

With the checkbox selected, we trigger the submit button click event again and execute the test script and review the results. On the successful new page, we check the elements on the new page and output the content of the page elements to the console for verification, followed by a final execute the test script and review the results. At this point, script execution has completed, local testing has passed.

8. Cloud Task Execution and Analysis

The final phase is cloud integration. We package the script into a .zip file and stop debugging on the cloud real device. Then, we upload the packaged test case to UDT.

In the platform, we create a test task, select the application, choose the test environment and framework, select the recently uploaded test case, and choose the cloud real device. Finally, we create and start the task.

All that's left is to wait for the task to complete. Once task execution completed, we can comprehensively review device screenshots, videos, and performance data provided by the platform.

This end-to-end workflow demonstrates the power and simplicity of using WeTest UDT for UI automation. It brings consistency, scalability, and deep insights to your testing process.