Android Development At Agile Speeds

One of the obstacles lately that I have run into is how do you describe an Android Agile Enabler Build System such as AndCooper. Usually, i am communicating with managerial people that already have some exposure to such code review items as unit/mock test code coverage, code comment coverage, code correctness measurements, and etc. Thus, you would think in explaining that currently only have of that is supported in that build systems have yet to be built supporting the other half I get this blankness in the conversation on their part and that is after I explain that because unit/mock testing and code coverage testing occurs on device it requires a more integrated build system than just throwing together a few lines of ANT XML scripting.

In other words usually in most code review processes focus around a continuous build process producing code analysis reports used in the code review process. While EMMA reports can be generated off EMMA data produced, the unit/mock test data is not in report form yet as its in either the IDE stdout/console, or the device/emulator. Now you could make the project manager have to know how to start up an emulator and run the build to get the data manually but most managers are busy and thus it should be automated. And quite frankly automating the process so that the developer can use that feedback daily catches errors before they hit the code review process thus saving the whole team development time.

It is quite simple. If you put the right infrastructure in place so that the developer as part of his or her hourly activity can run an automated code review process to use as feedback than there are less items that require correction after the project manager end of day code review. It is not that I do not like explaining it, it is that I am somewhat tired of running into non-caring managers as it has an immediate value to both the costs and that impact on costs towards profits something most project mangers should care about.

Of course it would be nice to encounter a manger that ‘gets it’. Onward, the next few days refactoring the Android Build Life Cycle than the final sequences of testing tasks and than a full preview release.

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EMMA Situation

Image via CrunchBase

I have been thinking about the EMMA unit test code coverage situaiton. As of right now you can only get that coverage for included apps in the build adn we do not know when the other tools come out to change this. What if I changed the Maekfile setup so that we could ‘insert’ our own apps as included apps in the Android source build. Yes, you would have to chane the Android.Manifest slightly but the value you would get is being able to execute an EMMA enabled build to get the EMMA test coverage metadata to do full test coverage.

It woudl be ahack, but I do not see any other solution at the moment.