Robotium : your mobile application's trusted friend
Acceptance testing (testing the product as a black box, from the end costumer’s perspective) is required for all products before delivering to the client. In the case of Mobile Applications, this is complicated by the diverse platforms available and the time that is needed to test these manually. This is further complicated by the fact that in these days, the same application might be ported to various formats (Symbian, J2ME, iPhone, Android, Palm, Web-app, etc..). Manual testing of these applications are time consuming and error prone, and hence a better solution needs to be found.
Automation of such tests is a time tested solution, borrowed from the PC environment, where tools such as Selenium has been used for years to do automated acceptance testing.
Robotium is an open source project, aimed at bringling selenium-like functionality of test automation to the Android platform.
Assuming you have a basic knowledge of Android application development. Read the references indicated if not.
Getting to run from Eclipse
Step 1. Installing android sdk and building and running your application on the emulator.
Step2: download Robotium and include it in the project references of your application
Step3: build with the new robotium,
Step 4: Run as Android JUnit test case
Getting to run from outside Eclipse:
Go to the project directory, do android –p . …
Now that you can manually do this, let us see how we can integrate this to a Continuous Integration tool such as Hudson.
Step 1: install Hudson
Step2: install the android sdk and Robotium as the user Hudson
Step3: install ant android plugin of Hudson
Step4: include svn
Step5: in the ant build options, give your build.xml of the project
Now when you start a build, from Hudson, you can see that there is an INJECT_EVENTS_PERMISSION needed error for the application. This is due to the fact that the screen Is locked. So you need to programmatically unlock the screen. I have a program that does this, (thanks to this blog post), and it needs to be installed and launched prior to the test application.
Making sense of the results..
The results are written to a log file, this could be parsed to see success or failure.
