Preparation for Android Testing Presentation

I will be giving a presentation tomorrow on Android Testing strategies for Mobile Monday (MoMo) Lansing.  The target audience is a blend of developers, managers, and anyone else interested in mobile.  My presentation is publicly available on Google Drive as is my demo source code hosted on bitbucket.

In preparation I had to come up to speed on the basics of the Google Android Testing Framework and the Robolectric Testing Framework.  I first learned about Robolectric over lunch at CodeMash 2013 and then got a great demonstration and some setup help from Nathan Dotz at Detroit DevFest 2013.

I am still pretty new to Android and am most comfortable working in the Eclipse IDE so that is how I configured my demo application and tests for my talk.  Here are a few notes of my experiences trying to get everything configured properly:

Android Testing Framework

• I purchased a copy of the Android Application Testing Guide by Diego Torres Milano
• I had no trouble setting up an Android Test Project following his instructions, except I had to manually add a Library reference to JUnit 3 which I didn't see mentioned
• I shamelessly borrowed his concept of a TemperatureConverter app to use as my demo

Robolectric

• This was definitely harder to configure, I found the configuration instructions at the Robolectric site to be somewhat confusing
• One thing that threw me off was Maven.  Turns out you don't need Maven to use Robolectric, but I spent several hours trying to get is configured on my own following the Maven quick-start instructions and then with help from Nathan Dotz.
• Generally speaking I found the Eclipse quick start instructions to be clear with these notes:
• I could not get the M2Eclipse plugin installed and didn't have time to figure out the problem
• I created my lib folder within Eclipse, not at the command line
• I used robolectric-1.3-20130226.015747-4-jar-with-dependencies.jar
• Will be demonstrating EasyMock as well so also copied in easymock-3.1.jar
• When I tried to run my first Robolectric test (as shown in their documentation), I encountered this error:  "WARNING: Unable to find path to Android SDK"
• I resolved this problem from the command line:
  $ CD to the folder containing my project root
  $ android update project -p {my project name}

Robolectric provides a sample app with tests covering some of the basics. I couldn't open the sample in Eclipse because of my M2Eclipse plugin woes so instead I opened it into IntelliJ IDEA which was a painless process.