WattDroid with Hudson and Unit Testing

Over the last few days I have been studying all the options for Android Continuous Integration and Unit Testing and well there is a plethora of choices to review.

Here are a few that I have reviewed:

Ant Related:

http://code.google.com/p/autoandroid/wiki/AndroidAnt

Hudson Related:

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=499519075367

JUnit Related:

http://mylifewithandroid.blogspot.com/2008/11/junit-in-android.html

http://marakana.com/tutorials/android/junit-test-example.html

http://code.google.com/p/robotium

What I have found is that Android requires its own unit testing libraries to perform tests that use Android libraries. Normal JUnit testing will work, however, it will not replicate actual functions the user will encounter. For example, it will test that a method returns the correct value given input, but it will not test if the user presses on a certain button and a result is shown in an Activity.

The classes that deal with specific Android testing are:

ActivityUnitTestCase and ActivityInstrumentationTestCase2

(ActivityInstrumentationTestCase is now deprecated)

The android.jar file also contains normal JUnit tests. I'm in the middle of evaluating a tool called Robotium ( http://code.google.com/p/robotium/ ) as well and it provides a simpler way to test Android applications, but this is mainly geared at the blackbox perspective, otherwise the users actions and the applications responses.

Robotium offers some interesting features and members of the Android community also say it is a valuable tool to learn. Here are a few of its features:

• You can develop powerful test cases, with minimal knowledge of the application under test.
• The framework handles multiple Android activities automatically.
• Minimal time needed to write solid test cases.
• Readability of test cases is greatly improved, compared to standard instrumentation tests.
• Test cases are more robust due to the run-time binding to GUI components.
• Blazing fast test case execution.
• Integrates smoothly with Maven or Ant to run tests as part of continuous integration.
• The Syntax is quite easy to understand as you can see in these examples.

Some others have recommended EasyMock as well. I am starting to feel all these extras are becoming a distraction and will stick to learning the standard Android test case classes and look further into Hudson CI after that.

Back to WattDroid...

Currently we are working on GPS integration and theming out application. The book we have doesn't really talk much about these two topics so we ordered a more advanced book Pro Android 2. However, in the meantime I have been trying to decipher and wad my way through some of the documentation and decent progress.

Until next time...

Remy