Android Agile Patterns

You might be wondering why I would spend so much time on integrating things via an ANT or Gradle build tool. The whole idea was to be able to do full application testing from beginning to end similar to the way OEMs do framework testing. In other words the developer should be able to run multiple devices and emulators through suite of  tests that include TDD and BDD unit tests among other UI tests and should get back test reports and screen shots.

Now we all know about Monkey UI Exerciser which is a small java api to drive UI testing events. That is not what I am referring to as we need some type of framework.  So what do we need:

-run multiple devices or emulators

-run the application

-be able to interact with ADB

-generates UI events and screenshots

Something has popped up in that I have not noticed it before, its called Monkeyrunner. Its a jython/python api/framework for driving both the android emulators and android devices. Is has a plugin system for using java to extend it and we have an ANT jtyhon task via dbmstools.

With this amount of control to run full set of test suites on an application on multiple emulators/devices why would you choose robolectric over robotium? Sure you get speed of test execution bu than you are sacrificing being able to run a real full tests suite.

But what about not enough Mock objects?  Let me tel you a secret about android mock  objects. A lot of them are not fully documented yet in examples which is why you really should explore android source code as you can find all sorts of useful mock testing objects that the android framework developers use.

Basically this means that the individual tests are using the device or emulator to run along with android-mock and robotium to provide TDD and BDD gets implemented using Instinct during your coding sessions.  Than at the end of the day you are using Monkeyrunner to run a suite of tests as jtyhon/python script that runs a suite of tests on the application across multiple devices and or emulators.

There are enough emulator add-ons provided by SonyEricsson, Samsung, and Motorola that while it does not cover ever device it does allow you cover enough of the android device space among popular handsets to catch most of the bugs that may be device specific.

Evidently Monkeyrunner has been in the SDK since 2.0 but I did not notice it before. Okay, thus I now know why I should be using robotium over robolectric.

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Agile Android Development

Gee, be nice if testing was easier and with the influx of  new frameworks does not make it any easier. The major reason why the average android developer does not unit test from the beginning(TDD) is that in any Virtual Machine mobile environment you run into situations where certain objects are not accessible to test.

Robotium and Calculon attempt to reduce the complexity by overlaying DSL concepts to come up with a new syntax to testing. Than we have droid-sugar/roboelectric which brings different style mocking to the area.

My thinking is why not combine the android port of easymock(Android-Mock) with some DSL syntax and it allows me to re-enforce my android internals knowledge. Plus the problem with mocks, is that effective mocking is on device/emulator the way Android-Mock implemented and with mocking on JVM rather than Dalvik you are doing a lot of extra steps for less effective results.

So AndCalculon is a polite fork of Calculon to integrate Calculon with Android-Mock and see how far I can take it. I will publish more later this week with the bitbucket.org link.