Learning Android Application Testing

Improve your Android applications through intensive testing and debugging

About This Book

• Focus on Android instrumentation testing to ensure full application coverage
• Apply testing techniques and utilize tools to improve Android application development
• Build intensively tested and bug free Android applications

Who This Book Is For

If you are an Android developer looking to test your applications or optimize your application development process, then this book is for you. No previous experience in application testing is required.

What You Will Learn

• Apply testing techniques and utilize tools to improve Android application development
• Get to grips with the nuances of testing on Android, including how to architect an application to facilitate better testing
• Explore the Android instrumentation testing framework to optimize your activities, services, content providers, and usage of other Android components
• Understand different development methodologies including Test-driven Development and Behavior-driven Development
• Apply the continuous integration technique for ultimate application quality control
• Improve application performance by analyzing the results returned from performance tests
• Expose your application to a wide range of conditions and configurations to simulate real-life network conditions and detect problems in the application
• Explore further tools to improve application quality such as micro benchmarks and code coverage

In Detail

This book is a practical introduction to readily available techniques, frameworks, and tools to thoroughly test your Android applications and improve project development.

You will learn the Java testing framework, how to create a test case and debug it. Next, you'll be walked through using the Android SDK to test using the ActivityTestCase and ActivityUnitTest classes as well as discussing popular testing libraries. Through examples you will test files, databases, ContentProviders, exceptions, services, and test your app using Espresso. You will discover how to manage your Android testing environment using Android emulators, deep dive into how adb and the emulator can super charge your testing automation, and also test user interactions with monkeyrunner. You will be guided through different testing methodologies including Test-driven Development and Behavior-driven Development and will learn how to perform Unit and Functional testing applying them to your Android projects. You will also use continuous integration techniques for ultimate application quality control using Gradle and Jenkins.

By the end of the book, you'll be looking through alternative testing tactics including Fest and Spoon to build upon and expand your Android testing range and finesse.

Paul Blundell

Paul Blundell is an aspiring software craftsman and senior Android developer at Novoda. Before Novoda, he worked at AutoTrader and Thales, with apps that he released racking up over one million downloads. A strong believer in software craftsmanship, SOLID architecture, clean code, and testing, Paul has used this methodology to successfully nurture and create many Android applications. These include the Tesco launcher app, which was preinstalled for the recently released Hudl2 tablet; MUBI, a unique film streaming service; and the AutoTrader UK car search app. If anyone wants to provide feedback, you can always tweet to him @blundell_apps. He also likes to write, so you can find more material at http://blog.blundellapps.com/.

Diego Torres Milano

Diego Torres Milano has been involved with the Android platform since its inception, by the end of 2007, when he started exploring and researching the platform's possibilities, mainly in the areas of user interfaces, unit and acceptance tests, and Test-driven Development. This is reflected by a number of articles mainly published on his personal blog (http://dtmilano.blogspot.com), and his participation as a lecturer in some conferences and courses, such as Mobile Dev Camp 2008 in Amsterdam (Netherlands) and Japan Linux Symposium 2009 (Tokyo), Droidcon London 2009, and Skillsmatter 2009 (London, UK). He has also authored Android training courses delivered to various companies in Europe. Previously, he was the founder and developer of several open source projects, mainly CULT Universal Linux Thin Project (http://cult-thinclient.sf.net) and the very successful PXES Universal Linux Thin Client project (that was later acquired by 2X Software, http://www.2x.com). PXES is a Linux-based operating system specialized for thin clients, used by hundreds of thousands of thin clients all over the world. This project has a popularity peak of 35 million hits and 400K downloads from SourceForge in 2005. This project had a dual impact. Big companies in Europe decided to use it because of improved security and efficiency; and organizations, institutions, and schools in some development countries in South America, Africa, and Asia decided to use it because of the minimal hardware requirements, having a huge social impact of providing computers, sometimes recycled ones, to everyone. Among the other open source projects that he founded are Autoglade, Gnome-tla, and JGlade, and he has contributed to various Linux distributions, such as RedHat, Fedora, and Ubuntu. He has also given presentations at the LinuxWorld, LinuxTag, GUADEC ES, University of Buenos Aires, and so on. Diego has also developed software, participated in open source projects, and advised companies worldwide for more than 15 years. He can be contacted at dtmilano@gmail.com.