Agile Android

Abstract

For a while now, Agile development has been problematic for Android developers. There have been a number of ways to test the user interface (UI), such as Robotium or Monkey Runner, but before Android Studio 1.1, unit testing was hard to use, hard to configure, and quite challenging to implement on the Android platform.Google would argue, no doubt, that in the past you could use JUnit3-style unit testing. But for anyone from classic Java development this was a dramatic backward step in time. Developers would stumble along hacking together a JUnit4 development environment using a number of third-party tools. More likely than not they would simply give up as the ever-increasing series of mutually incompatible library dependencies would finally wear them down. Because there simply wasn’t the toolbox for the Android developer, Agile development on the mobile platform was immature and reminiscent of Java development in the early 2000s. Thankfully all this has changed - Android now supports JUnit4 and Android developers can now return to unit testing. It’s early days yet in the world of Android JUnit4 testing world and the documentation is thin on the ground, so in this book we’re going to show practical ways to get your unit testing up and running using Android Studio. We’ll also look at how this can be complemented by other UI-specific Android testing libraries such as Espresso to create a complete Agile testing framework for Android developers.