Stress testing Android applications using Monkey

Monkey is a super cool program (ships along with Android SDK, hence you don’t have to do any installation) which does stress testing of your application. It actually generates pseudo-random streams of user even like clicking, touching and making gestures along with some system level events like rotating phone, muting the phone, turning off data connection etc. Monkey will stress test your application in both emulators and in you real hardware device.

Execution

Monkey is a command-line tool, hence to execute the tool you have to do is first get the package name of your apk file (The application under test). In my case, I am going to test my calculator application (You want to download the application, here is the link) and the name of the package is com.example.calcapplication as shown below Now, here is the command to run Monkey from command prompt

adb shell monkey -p com.example.calcapplication -v 2000

As you could see, I have given –p for package name which is followed by the package name of my application, similarly I have given 2000 which is the number of pseudo-random event I am going to execute against my application. You can see the full list of command from here Let’s execute the above command against my application but the bad news is my application broken at 22^nd event itself L Here is the screenshot It’s really a very interesting tool to stress test your application and for testers it’s a very good tool to showcase your skill in stress testing of android applications too J Thanks, Karthik KK