Different tools for Automating Android Applications

In the last post we discussed classification of Android applications and there types and in this post we will discuss about different types of automation testing tools available for automating android applications. There are different types of automation testing tools available for android and some of the most popular are

• Robotium
• Selendroid
• Appium
• Espresso
• Ranorex
• Monkey Talk etc

 

• This is the tool which we are going to discuss in this series and we will cover it lot more detail in upcoming video of this series.
• Robotium is an Android test automation framework that has full support for native and hybrid applications. Robotium makes it easy to write powerful and robust automatic black-box UI tests for Android applications. With the support of Robotium, test case developers can write function, system and user acceptance test scenarios, spanning multiple Android activities

  Selendroid is a test automation framework which drives off the UI of Android native and hybrid applications (apps) and the mobile web. Tests are written using the Selenium 2 client API.

• No modification of app under test is required
• Support parallel testing using Selenium Grid
• Has built-in inspector to locate the element

• Appium is built on the idea that testing native apps shouldn’t require including an SDK or recompiling your app. And that you should be able to use your preferred test practices, frameworks, and tools.
• Appium is an open source project and has made design and tool decisions to encourage a vibrant contributing community.

• Espresso is yet another tool (or API to be more precise) for Android, which is pretty small, concise and easy to learn. Espresso was introduced on GTAC 2013 conference and the goal is to let developers write concise code for testing UI of application.
• Even though the target audience for Espresso is developers (as mentioned by google) ,I don’t think its completely void for testers, since espresso leverage some of the potential key features which Robotium and Selendroid lacks
• You can learn more from http://executeautomation.com/blog/espresso-for-android/

You can watch the discussion as video shown below Please leave your comments and let me know if there is anything need to be improved in this post. Thanks, Karthik KK