Android automation is done by many tools, there are many proprietary tools like
Ranorex, Seetest, droidpilot etc which does android automation very easily.
But we are going to focus on one of the best open source automation testing tool called
Robotium
Robotium sounds more like Selenium, since it’s a kind of it, instead of operating in browsers, it operates in Android.
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 test cases. With the support of Robotium, test case developers can write function, system and acceptance test scenarios, spanning multiple Android activities.
With Robotium you can test application which has
- Only APK file (Black box testing)
- Which has source code of application (White box testing)
What’s the difference?
If you have to test an android application and you don’t have access to source code of the application, which means you have only the APK file, you can test the application using Robotium, which is nothing but back box testing
In the other case, if you have the full source code of the application and you need to test the application using Robotium, then you can do that too, which is white box testing
To set up the Robotium, all you need is
- Java
- Eclipse Indigo
- ADT plugin for Eclipse
- Robotium Jar
You can see how to configure the first three options from my previous article “
Setting up stage ready for Android Application development”
Let’s see how to install Robotium, well the term
install doesn’t looks correct here, we can call it as
importing Robotium Jar.
You can download the latest Robotium Jar file from here (Mine is 4.3)
https://code.google.com/p/robotium/downloads/detail?name=robotium-solo-4.3.jar&can=2&q=
You can also download the Robotium docs from here
https://code.google.com/p/robotium/downloads/detail?name=robotium-solo-4.3-javadoc.jar&can=2&q=
Now that you have downloaded the JAR file, all we need to do is to associate the JAR file with the Test project of android and you are good to go.
We will see the detailed steps of associating the robotium JAR file in Test project and running test against the same in next topic “
Automating your Calculator application using Robotium”
Thanks,
Karthik KK
