Android App : Automtion Testing Tools - Part I

Introduction

As the mobile platform continues to pervade all aspects of human activities,
and mobile apps on such platform tend to be faulty just like other types of software,
There is a growing need for automated testing techniques for mobile applications.

 Why Do Automate - 

• Reduce ongoing costs of regression testing across multiple devices.
• Create Automation which is reusable across multiple handsets with minimal changes to scripts to cater existing as well as future handsets.
• To minimize challenges in manual testing, load testing, crashes

Limitation of Manual Testing -

• Diversity of devises
• OS versions
• Different h/w configuration
• Different screen sizes

Different Automation Tools

1. Monkey
2. Monkey Runner
3. Robotium
4. Selenium Webdriver

Monkey -

• The Monkey is a command-line tool that that you can run on any emulator instance or on a device.
• We can send random user events which acts as a stress test on the application
• Help to determine crashes or any sort of unhandled exception
• When the Monkey runs, it generates events and sends them to the system

Monkey Runner -

• Multiple device control
• Functional testing: can run an automated start-to-finish test of an Android application. You provide input values with keystrokes or touch events, and view the results as screenshots.
• It is like record and playback tool, will record user actions / input, we can execute those on emulator / devices

Robotium -

• Open-source test framework
• Need to write solid test case
• The framework handles multiple Android activities automatically
• Must have basic knowledge of Android programming.
• Support testing on real devices
• System and acceptance test

Android Webdriver -

• Tests can only be written in Java
• Android WebDriver models many user interactions such as finger taps, flicks, finger scrolls and long presses