Testing Patience

Its interesting to go on interviews to see if people really get testing or not and its role in the agile process.  For example, the set of ant-rules files that is distributed with the android sdk has had annoying little mistakes in key areas such as the coverage target inn test_rules, etc for awhile. My correction to the coverage target is in this Gist.

And those little mistakes are usually encountered by just executing the scripts and going through all  the developer user cases…in other words functional testing of the ant scripts.  Its the same testing of patience when you participate in interviews and receive the impression that the potential firm is not using testing.

If you are an android bug reporter please vote for the bug, issue 17305. Lets vote on enough of these bugs in the ant rules files included with the sdk that the ant scripts become extremely useful instead of half baked.

 

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Hacking the android SDK

Most of us need the stacktrace, mapping, seed files of our proguard runs and log statements stripped.  Thus, take my proguard.cfg copy and change the one in your sdk to mine os that you have that when you create new projects. Oh, you  did not know you could change certain files in the SDK to make your life easier? All the cool android developers are doing it.

Android 2.2 SDK

The Android 2.2 Sdk release is probably on Wed morning. But, this sdk release is different.

Not only do we have a quarter where android device sales surpassed iphone(remember I told you it was going to happen in 2010 not 2011), we also have an Android SDK that represents both Google and OHA taking outside suggestions and incorporating that into the SDK. Such improvements as a Dalvik Just-In-time(JIT) unit and being able to store applications on a SD-card.

Android 2.2 release

6 days ago the platform/SDK.git was merged from tools v6. This may be an indication of a very soon release of SDK tools v6 and Android SDK 2.2 before the iPhone 4 OS release this summer.

The only side information I have at the moment which was oen of the comments in one my March posts is that more Android UI components have been refactored to have more public points of access for developers and that includes Android Tabs.

Side Note: Android SDK tools v6 has you download SDK addons via the avd manager,  still no details of does that allow GoogleMaps to be enabled with those SDK emulator addons.

A Knol tracking the road-map has been posted.

EMMA suport for Anroid SDK 1.6 R2

Google is updating prior SDKs to include EMMA support, first one is API level 4 which is SDK 1.6r2. Details here. Some other fixes as well including the emulator skin fix for the d-pad.