Is there a way to shorten the time between test steps

When executing a test automation script in Katalon Studio the time it takes between test steps is too long; tested on local iOS device (iPhone 6 running iOS 12).
I’ve already tried altering the execution settings param “Default wait for element timeout (in seconds)” within the Project settings, without getting the expected result.

Example:
When I set the value for “Default wait for element timeout (in seconds)” to 10 seconds the time between test steps still can take up to 30 seconds (or even more).

Is there a way to shorten the time between test steps?

if your device is slow - and I assume the iPhone 6 IS slow then you change whatever you want as waiting time … it needs its time until the elements are rendered in the apps / web sites withing the iPhone.

have you ever tried to run the same tests on latest iphone device also with iOS 12?

what are the results then?

in my company we don’t support such old models anymore - as we ran exactly in these kind of issues all the time :frowning:

When testing the same automation script on iPhone X (running iOS 12) the automation script is executed 3 times faster. I was actually quite surprised by this result, because when executing the same steps manually on the iPhone 6 the app responds quick to user interactions.

That was expected, as iPhone6 was originally shipped with iOS 8 !

I assume that for the automation some snippets of code must run on the mobile device to enable it for automation. And maybe this piece of software is making the automation process slow because it was optimized for newer generations of mobile devices and operating systems.

Additionally I did some manual testing on iPhone 6 and iPhone X as well on physical devices we have in the company - and indeed - manuelly I did not spot a huge difference in the response behaviour of the apps I used. But then in automation, 6 much more slower than the X.

I think - we have to live with it.

Hi @masdesign,

I think you’re seeing a difference between the underlying UI testing frameworks in iOS. Before iOS 10, there was a framework called UIAutomation. In iOS 10 and above, the new framework is XCUITest.

From this site, I found a mention of performance improvements with XCUITest:

As we are aware of the fact that, XCUIApplication is a proxy app that interacts with the main app which is used to launch, terminate and query the main application. Apple was using snapshot tool to communicate between XCUI app and main App which was causing performance issues in terms of time and memory. Now snapshot has been removed and replaced with remote query and query analysis technique to improve the performance of the XCUItests. We might have faster execution of the tests.

Hope this helps,

Chris

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