Tips & Tricks: Using Perfecto When Working Remotely

COVID-19 — the coronavirus — is forcing many workplaces to go remote for the foreseeable future. When going into the office is not an option, you need to make sure your team is set up for success at home. Fortunately, Perfecto can be accessed safely and securely from anywhere.

Perfecto provides you access to the mobile devices and browser instances you need from anywhere at any time. With Perfecto, you don’t need to worry about updates, whether devices are running, or if you have the right number of combinations.

Most teams access the Perfecto cloud solution from inside their global offices. But teams can access the cloud solution from anywhere in the world.

Perfecto’s Security for Remote Access

A primary concern when accessing any solution is security. You may wonder, does the solution track and allow access to only those users I want? Does it give only certain permissions to users based on their role?

For Perfecto, the answer to both of these questions is yes.

Perfecto allows you to control access for anyone in the cloud solution via SSO or a normal login. You can also grant permissions (privileges) to each user via groups so that your data is always secure.

Perfecto uses a security token to connect to the platform. This means that even if you are working from a remote location your username and password is never exposed. You can generate your security token here.

Then, use your token inside the automation script, as seen below.

Remote Teams

Perfecto is a modern, cloud-based solution that scales as your team needs it. Your teams can all be in one location, spread out globally, or working from home. The solution will scale for both manual testers and automated testers running scripts from anywhere in the world.

Public Apps/Sites

Most users have public-facing solutions they need to test. Perfecto can quickly and easily access production applications available publicly or via the app stores (iOS and Android). This means you can test as your users would use your app without any device or browser limitations.

Internal Apps/Sites

If you have an internal site or app that needs to be tested, you could run into a problem. You may be wondering how you can access the site or app from a public cloud provider like Perfecto.

Fortunately, Perfecto has you covered. If you have web apps or mobile tests that are within your internal network, you can use Perfecto Connect.

Perfecto Connect — or pConnect — allows you to establish a secure tunnel between Perfecto and these non-public apps. The tunnel is based on SSH and allows a secure connection without the need for a VPN. The benefit is an end-to-end automation and integration flow of Perfecto devices (web and mobile) to your backend development environment.

Perfect Connect (pConnect) Supports:

1. Mobile devices and desktop web (fast web Windows devices only).
2. Digital interactive, automation, and CI test executions.
3. Associating multiple devices with the same tunnel.
4. Tunnel initiation from MacOS, Windows, and Linux workstations.
5. Bridging proxies (installed on a workstation), including Charles proxy and others for debugging and troubleshooting.
6. Debugging over real devices from your local network/backend environment.

Learn more about Perfecto Connect here.

If you run into issues with Perfecto Connect, we have a quick guide to troubleshooting here.

Associate a Device With a Perfecto Connect Tunnel

You can also connect a device directly to the tunnel to gain access to your local resource (web server or app) using the tunnelId you received from Perfecto Connect.

Learn how to associate a new tunnelId with a device here.

Manual (Interactive) Testing

1.    In the Manual Testing view, click the Perfecto Connect button.

2. From the menu that opens, select the required tunnelId.

3. Open the required device or web session. When Perfecto Connect is turned on, the device you open in the lab automatically connects.

4.    To end the session, click the Perfecto Connect button again to stop and end the connection. 

Capabilities for Execution

The following is a list of the capabilities we are setting for this automated test execution:

• securityToken — Your Perfecto security token.
• user — Your Perfecto username (use only if security token is not supported for your Perfecto Lab).
• password — Your password (use only if security token is not supported for your Perfecto Lab).
• deviceName — The Device ID which you'd like to use (we're using a single device for demonstration purposes, but you may use several).
• tunnelId — The Tunnel ID received from perfectoconnect.

Prerequisite: Before using Perfecto Connect in interactive mode, run the perfectoconnect client and save the tunnelId, as described above.

In your Automation script, perform the following steps:

1. Launch the device to connect.
2. Copy the tunnelID from the perfectoconnect client.
3. Use the perfectoconnect.attach function, supplying the tunnelId as the parameter value.
4. To disconnect the device, use the perfectoconnect.detach function, supplying the tunnelId as the parameter value.

For information on using Perfecto Connect with your CI job (Jenkins), click here.

Perfecto Is Here to Help

For more information, please refer to the Perfecto documentation site.

If you need assistance, reach out to the Perfecto Support Portal.