Testing the UI without UI Testing in Swift

[joemasilotti]

Questions/comments about my latest blog post? Post them here!

[joemasilotti]

I've started implementing a Real Library™ to cover the topics discussed in this post.

Announcing Ruka - Testing the UI without UI Testing, a Swift experiment.

Labels, buttons, navigation, modals, steppers, and switches are working. Up next: sliders, text fields, gestures, and more.

I'd love to hear what you think!

[srgray]

Thanks for posting this, it's very interesting.
Question: it feels like there is a tradeoff between testability for some of this and proper Swift access controls. E.g. I like to have my IBOutlets private if possible but that seems to limit my ability to test a tap on a UIButton. Do I have to just give in and make them accessible with an access control higher than private?

[joemasilotti]

Great point, @srgray! That's exactly why I built Ruka. It's still in beta, but the concepts are tried and true.

Instead of exposing your labels/buttons publicly, traverse the UI recursively looking for something that matches. Ruka encapsulates this to offer helpers like so:

let controller = SomeViewController()
let app = App(controller: controller)

let label = app.label("Label title")
app.tapButton(title: "Button title")