Test-Scenario Building in Stego for Sling App: A Beginner’s Review

Author: Maya Harper

A Little About Myself

Hi, I’m Maya, a new member of Apptest.ai’s marketing team. Recently, I was tasked with building and running a Stego scenario myself to truly understand the platform and market it more effectively.

With my only software engineering experience being a single Java class in college, I anticipated this task would be a challenge. However, I was pleasantly surprised—the hardest part of using Stego was simply downloading it. Once installed, the process was intuitive and, dare I say, fun.

Downloading Stego

When I say the most challenging part of using Stego was the download, it’s because Apptest.ai’s manual recommends updating several key tools:

• Xcode
• iOS
• macOS
• Stego (if not updated, Xcode errors may occur)

Additionally, you must physically connect your iPhone to your Mac. If you don’t update these components, Xcode will give errors that the manual doesn’t address directly. So, treat these updates more as requirements than suggestions.

Once I updated everything, the process was seamless. No more errors, and I could see my iPhone screen mirrored onto my Mac, as described in the Apptest.ai manual.

Building a Scenario with Stego

After setting up the mirroring, I used the Sling app to build my first test scenario in Stego. I created a workspace, added a new scenario, and followed the Scenario Authoring Tutorial to add my first step.

What amazed me was how intuitive the commands were. In just a few minutes, I created a scenario that could:

• Open the Sling app from my home screen
• Scroll to find a specific show
• Turn on subtitles
• Search for a specific show and record it

Stego was able to replicate most of my real-life actions within the app. The basic functions, like “touch” (which mimics touching the screen), were simple to understand. Even more advanced functions like “loop”, which allows for repeated actions, were easy to grasp with the help of the Scenario Authoring Tutorial.

Scenario Building: Shortcomings

While building scenarios was mostly smooth, there was one function that Stego couldn’t handle: dragging the progress bar in a video to a specific point, such as skipping from the 5-minute mark to the 15-minute mark.

Stego requires visual cues on the screen to trigger actions, but there’s currently no way to instruct it to drag to an exact timestamp. I’m confident Apptest.ai’s developer team is working on this, but it’s a reminder that Stego is still evolving.

I also encountered issues due to the nature of the Sling app itself. Since Sling’s LiveTV content updates every 30 minutes, my scenario struggled to find a specific show when it was no longer on the screen. Although it was easy to replace the show with a new title, this highlighted that scenarios built on dynamic apps like Sling may not run the same way each time.

Running the Scenario

Running my scenario didn’t go perfectly the first time—Stego stumbled on steps it had previously completed. However, after a few adjustments and reruns, it successfully executed the entire scenario.

The goal of my scenario was to ensure the Sling app was functioning correctly.

Specifically, the scenario included:

• Looping and scrolling actions to locate the “Oceans’ 8” movie.
• Checking basic app operations, like navigating with arrow buttons.
• Finally, using the ‘If UIObject’ step to perform an assertion check for the signed-in state by verifying whether the “sign out” button was visible—confirming the user was correctly signed in.

The scenario consisted of 19 steps, and it took Stego three attempts to run through it successfully—essentially debugging the scenario during these tries.

Takeaways and Advice

Despite the initial time investment for setup, building scenarios with Stego turned out to be intuitive and efficient. Here’s my advice:

• Update all necessary software before getting started to avoid any errors.
• Keep in mind that Stego is still in its early stages of development, so some apps may have features that Stego doesn’t fully support yet. If you encounter such a case, I recommend contacting the Apptest.ai team to help develop the functionality you need.

Once Stego is properly set up, you’ll quickly become a scenario-authoring expert!