When I was offered to review this book, I was so excited. The topic is probably one of the least popular topics in the Android development circle based on the number of books written on Android. Most of the books in the market tend to cover solely on the area of actual development because it gives readers an instant gratification when creating something. However, it is unfortunate (but true) that the application testing might be something most developers least think about, or if they do, they not do it systematically. (I’m guilty of this as well.) I would like to expand my horizon by learning from the pros. That’s why I’m so excited for a chance to review this book.
The “Android Application Testing Guide” is a very practical book introducing available frameworks and most widely used tools & techniques to improve the qualify of the application by engaging in the quality control and testing throughout the development cycle (not just start testing at the end). This agile development concept called the Test Driven Development (TDD) relies on repeatable short cycle to trying to catch and take care of potential issues (i.e., bugs) as early as possible.
The first chapter explains what involves in the different stages of testing in the Android development including unit test, integration test, functional or acceptance test, system test, and performance test. It starts introducing the Android testing framework extending JUnit which provides the complete testing framework suitable for the end-to-end testing strategies.
The chapter 2 starts working on the actual testing using JUnit which is the default framework for Android testing project and is supported by Eclipse which it the most widely-used IDE for Android development. The chapter jumps right into the step-by-step on how to create the Android test project which is a separate from its development project being tested. The test project will have independent structure and a set of its own components. Having a separate project is the best practice because from the production build’s standpoint, testing codes will not be included in the actual build, thus it will be not be in the APK.
Chapter 3 dives into individual building block in the Android SDK tool. This covers Assertions, TouchUtils class (to simulate the touch events), Mock objects (to simulate mock objects in order to isolate the tests), TestCase class, and Instrumentation. There is an extensive explanation of individual component accompanying by code samples.
Chapter 4 talks about the concept of Test Driven Development. Again, it is the strategy of performing tests along the development process – not at the end as in the traditional approach. This even includes writing test cases (and test codes) first right after studying the requirements, and then writing the actual codes to satisfy (having the “pass” results) the test cases. Author claims that this approach of creating test cases this early will ensure that tests will be performed instead of, if left until the end, it is highly possible that they would have been forgotten or ignored. I agree with the concept. But in reality this may not work with all types of the projects, and this is confirmed by author in a few paragraphs later to use your judgement and expertise in applying this approach to wherever suitable. The latter part of the chapter shows samples on how to apply the TDD in the step-by-step sample application and tests, which I found this makes the case very compelling.
Chapter 5 introduces the Android Virtual Device (AVD) which is the next best thing to the real devices. The obvious advantage of using AVD is ability to create different Android configurations to run tests. The Headless Emulator (no window displayed) is also mentioned here allowing the automated tests via command line with no windows. I really enjoy many samples of what you can do with command-lines especially when you can simulate different device’s conditions including network bandwidth throttling, or different locales, etc. Later in the chapter, it talks about the support of the Monkey application (you can read more about Monkey Theorem here) which allows random event generation. It also demos the server-client setup and test scripting with Monkneyrunner.
Chapter 6 talks about the Behavior Driven Development which, according to author, is considered the evolution of the Test Driven Development and a need of Acceptance Testing. In summary, the approach emphasizes not only to include the business or end users in testing, but also to use non-technical terms in the test cases that business or end users would understand. Personally I think the concept is too abstract than practical. However, the introduction of Fitnesse and Slim tools makes the point to see its usefulness especially the part of “Wiki”-style test cases and test result documentation.
Chapter 7 contains all practical real-world samples of the disciplines and techniques you can use in the different situations. This includes testings on activities and applications, databases and Content Providers, UIs, exceptions, parsers and memory leaks. Couple tools are introduced here including EasyMock which provides mock objects for interfaces, and Hamcrest which is a library of matcher objects for comparison.
Chapter 8 continues the introduction of Agile technique with Continuous integration. Similar to continuous testing, it is suggested that integration should be done frequently early in the process and in small steps. The most common practice, as stated by author, is to trigger the build process after every commit to the source code repository. The chapter goes in details how to setup the automate building process using ant, the version control repository using Git, the continuous integration with Hudson, and test result analysis using nbandroid-utils.
Chapter 9 discusses one of the most critical components in designing Android application which is performance. As we all know, with a device which has limited computing power and battery life, balancing between performance and effective use of resources is something developers should keep in mind when designing an Android application. The chapter again introduces us with a series of tools and techniques for performance testing. This includes using traditional LogCatlogging, extending Instrumentation, Traceview, dmtracedump, and Caliper microbenchmarks.
Chapter 10 – alternative testing tactic is not for the most Android developers as it involves building Android from source code. Again, more tools are introduced. Even though it is very technical, it is still a good read.
Summary:
I have to say that for a novice Android developer like I am, I learn a lot from reading the Android Application Testing Guide. Best-in-class testing techniques are covered in this book which are commonly practiced in the agile development. These include Test Driven Development, Behavior Driven Development, Continuous Integration, etc. They in generally oppose to the traditional approach of doing test and integration at the end of development cycle. However, as author states in the book, there is no silver bullets in software development – the suggested testing approaches might not apply to certain needs or projects. But I can see that for a large complex project, applying these methodologies and techniques will likely increase in the productivity and quality.
Numerous tools are introduced in this book. This may be one of the big issues for those who are less-advanced in Android development. Since there is no common repository of these tools, extended knowledge of a varieties of open-source tools, and ability to incorporate them with the development process are required. I wish that there would be consolidated repository for all testing tools or even better all required testing functionality would be built-in in the SDK. Well, before when that would happen, this Android Application Testing Guide book is probably one of a few reference books that has the complete collection of Android testing topics.
Disclosure: I received the Android Application Testing Guide e-book from Pubkt publishing with no charge. I’m not compensated for this book review. The content expressed in this post is personal opinion.
