Applications and environments are an essential part of testing in mabl, creating a framework for your team's testing strategy. This article provides an overview of applications and environments as they are defined in mabl.
Configuring applications and environments is a prerequisite step for accomplishing the following:
- Associating tests to a specific application URL or mobile build
- Organizing tests into plans
- Running tests on a schedule
- Pulling variables from environments
- Integrating tests into your CI/CD pipeline
- Testing applications that can't be accessed from the public Internet
- Reviewing aggregate test status and coverage metrics to assess application quality
The following diagram illustrates how applications and environments organize your tests at a high level.
Mabl workspace organization
Applications
Applications in mabl represent the list of applications you are testing. For example, a workspace for Plants-To-Go, a hypothetical ecommerce business that sells indoor plants, might have these three applications on the configuration page:
- Plants-To-Go web application
- Plants-To-Go marketing site
- Plants-To-Go job portal
Default mabl plans
When you create a new application, mabl adds two default plans and tests to the workspace.
Default mabl plans
- The "Verify home page load and login" plan contains one test: "Visit home page." This test is a basic smoke test that visits the application URL. The "Visit home page" test runs every 4 hours and on deployment.
- The "Check all pages for broken links and errors" plan also contains one test: "Visit all linked pages within the app." This test is also known as the link crawler test. The link crawler test runs once a week.
Environments
Environments in mabl should align with stages of your software development lifecycle where you deploy your code to, such as Dev, QA, Alpha, Beta, Release Candidate, and Production.
You can configure application URLs and mobile builds for one or more environments. In the following example, the application Acme App is configured to run in the Production, QA, and Staging environments.
A sample application in mabl
Environment settings
The following settings are controlled at the environment level:
- Environment variables - store variables at the environment level and use them across multiple tests
- Link agent - set up a secure tunnel to test applications in internal environments that cannot be accessed from the public Internet
- Page interaction speed - modify the speed of interaction in Unified test runs
Learn more
For more information, check out the following articles: