Robotium is an Android testing framework that allows automation of Android app tests using JUnit. It launches the app on an emulator, programmatically enters values and clicks buttons, and reports which tests pass or fail. Automating tests in this way makes re-running tests after code changes simple and removes human intervention.

1. Software Engineering Large Practical
Testing Android apps with Robotium
Stephen Gilmore
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
October 24th, 2012
Stephen Gilmore Software Engineering Large Practical

2. News
There will be no SELP lecture next week. Our next lecture
will be on the 7th of November.
Reminder: the deadline for Part 1 of the SELP is tomorrow at
16:00.
Stephen Gilmore Software Engineering Large Practical

3. Software testing
A test framework called Robotium is available for testing Android
applications. Using Robotium we can automate tests of Android
apps, and collect statistics on which tests passed and which tests
failed, using the JUint test framework.
Stephen Gilmore Software Engineering Large Practical

4. Import Robotium and make an instance of Solo
Stephen Gilmore Software Engineering Large Practical

5. Write a void method whose name begins with “test”
Stephen Gilmore Software Engineering Large Practical

6. Run as an Android JUnit test
Stephen Gilmore Software Engineering Large Practical

7. The emulator appears
Stephen Gilmore Software Engineering Large Practical

8. The app under test launches
Stephen Gilmore Software Engineering Large Practical

9. Values are entered in the fields
Stephen Gilmore Software Engineering Large Practical

10. These values have been entered programmatically
Stephen Gilmore Software Engineering Large Practical

11. The button click also is performed for us
Stephen Gilmore Software Engineering Large Practical

12. All tests passed (there was only one)
Stephen Gilmore Software Engineering Large Practical

13. If some failed, we can see which
Stephen Gilmore Software Engineering Large Practical

14. Software testing
A testing framework such as Robotium allows us to formally
document a series of tests which we expect our app to pass. These
are embedded in the code of the test harness. After every change
to our code we can re-run the test harness and check that all tests
still pass.
Automating testing in this way can turn a boring manual task
which is a chore to do into a simple automatic task which is easy
to re-run and operates entirely without human intervention.
Stephen Gilmore Software Engineering Large Practical