There’s no stopping Futter when it comes to stepping up the ladder of success and becoming a renowned framework worldwide. With every project it partakes in, its functionality just keeps getting better. Its recognition in the web and app development industry is indeed profound, but that does not mean one should not think about the performance of Flutter apps.
Sometimes, even the best frameworks encounter performance issues in terms of slow apps, lack of efficiency, and much more. So, what solutions to bring to the table to deal with the performance issues? In simple words, this can be done through performance optimization using performance testing of apps.
Before beginning with the “whats” and “hows” of Flutter application testing, let’s quickly glance over a few guidelines for performance optimization of Flutter apps. Here they are-
- Don’t update states if they are not much required.
- When updating the state, update as few widgets as possible.
- Avoid rebuilding all the widgets repetitively
- Computationally intensive tasks should not be involved outside the build methods
With the given guidelines, Flutter application testing would be more effective, but again, performance optimization depends mostly on your app. It’s only after the performance testing that one gets to know if the particular optimization will yield the best solution to each problem for the app.
What’s special about Flutter performance testing?
As we are talking about Flutter app testing, you must know some good things about it. So being the renowned framework that Flutter is, its performance testing is also worth admiring. Performance testing is crucial for improved user experience. App testing results in smooth scrolling and meaningful animations free of stuttering, known as “jank.”
When it comes to app testing, Flutter provides great performance profiling tools like DartDevTools, which includes Flutter inspector. Then you have Flutter Driver for exercising the app and, lastly, profile mode for saving performance information securely.
Now let’s move ahead and talk more about Flutter performance testing in depth.
Generally, a well-test app has to pass through several units and widgets tests. So, that’s where we are heading next. We will now look at different kinds of tests that result in enhancing the performance of Flutter apps and make them highly optimized. Let us begin!
Unit test
A unit test is responsible for testing a single function, method, or class. Verifying the correctness of a unit under a variety of conditions is basically its goal. It’s not the nature of a unit test to read or write to disk, render to screen, or receive user actions from outside the test process.
To learn more about the functioning of the Unit test, run Flutter test –help in your terminal.
Widget tests
As the name suggests, a widget test tests a single widget. The widget test has its goal sorted. It verifies the widget’s UI looks and interacts with it. Moreover, a test environment that provides the right widget lifecycle context is required when testing a widget.
A widget test is more extensive than a unit test. The reason is that the widget being tested has to receive and respond to user actions and events, performance layout, and manifest child widgets.
Besides, similar to a unit test, a widget test also replaces the environment with a considerably simpler implementation than a full-fledged UI system.
Integration test
The test responsible for covering a large part or, in most cases, a complete app is none other than the integration test. It is upon integration tests to ensure all the widgets and services previously tested in the app are working as expected. Not just that, integration tests verify the app’s overall performance.
Coming to the functioning of an integration test, it either runs on a real device or on an OS stimulator or Android Emulator. To avoid skewing the results, the app under test is usually segregated from the test driver code.
How Appium Flutter Driver streamlines Flutter app testing?
An automation tool that works well with native, hybrid, Android, iOS, and Windows apps, yes, that’s the Appium automation framework. It is an open-source testing framework known for performing tests for different platforms using the same API.
To perform Flutter app tests, the tool uses WebSocket communication to maintain the WDIO script and Appium Flutter finder. Afterward, the app-under-tests respond to the script through the Appium Fluitter driver.
Now let’s see what the app testing goes like.
- Download the package from Github consisting of Appium Flutter Driver and Appium Flutter finder. Cloning the package to get a WDIO code can also be done.
- Change the directory to the “appium” folder to run the test;
- In the console, use the “appium” command to start the appium server;
- Start the Android emulator and check the emulator with “adb devices);
- Install the Node.JS package;
- Change Android configuration in test.JS;
- Finally, run the “APPIUM_OS=android npm start” command to start the appium automation.
Closing words
Flutter apps are of great quality, agreed! And yes, it is a framework with promising functionality and performance, but that does not mean we can overlook its app testing part. Testing Flutter apps does not just improve the performance, but it is also utilized to make apps efficient and less CPU time and battery-consuming.
Although app testing comes last in the app development process, one must consider it an essential part from the very beginning. Finally, when the app is all ready, Flutter’s testing tools like Appium automation comes in and performs high-quality testing on the product, producing even higher-quality Flutter apps.
