Android

How to test energy consumption on Android devices

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Last week I attended the Eclipse Testing Day 2013 in Darmstadt/ Germany. The main topic of the conference was Mobile Testing. One of the best talks was “Energy testing and optimization of mobile applications” by Claas Wilke. Claas talked about the energy consumption of apps and that this topic is not considered by all developers during the development and testing phase. To prevent apps to consume to much battery, Claas developed a tool called JouleUnit. JouleUnit is an energy profiler, that can be used for Android apps, to find unnecessary battery usage of the app during runtime. JouleUnit is using the Android instrumentation framework to test the app. Beside profiling the battery usage you can also monitor the device CPU, WiFi or the display brightness. JouleUnit tests have the same structure like JUnit tests. At the end of the test run a nice graph is generated to see the battery consumption of the app.

JouleUnit Graph

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It’s like 10000 knives when all you need is a Spoon

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Isn’t ironic that there are so many Android test automation tools and it took me half a year to stumble up on Spoon?
Spoon is an Android test automation tool that is able to run your written java tests on several devices at the same time WITHOUT rooting the device.
Spoon is developed by the company Square, the company already open sourced some really nice tools (see the Open Source Space).

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Mobile App Update Testing

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During the development process of mobile apps manual and automated testing is highly recommended. But there is another test you should do before releasing or submitting your app to a store. Testing the update procedure! Testing the update procedure from the current store version to the new release candidate is really important and it is … Read more

Building Test Suites for Robotium

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If you have implemented many automated tests with Robotium, you will notice that Robotium is not the fastest tool when it comes to test execution time! Especially in big projects with more than 100 automated Robotium tests the execution time is really long (>1h). For nightly regression testing this is not a problem, but If you want to know if a simple commit from a developer break something, executing the whole test suite is not very efficient. To get a much faster impression of the quality of the last commits, you can build for example a smoke test suite. This suite covers the basic functionality like login, clicking on important entries but not all edge cases, like a full regression test suite will do.

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Kindle Fire Tablets Pre-Submission Assessment Guide

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Today, Amazon send an email to all Amazon App Store developers who have already an app in their store. This email included also a link of a Pre-Submission Assessment Guide where developers find hint and tipps how to test their app for the store. The list is a nice overview of possible things that should be tested during development and before submission. Also a short test example is provided! Good for developers who have no own QA, for QA people this list is not enough ;).

How to Use This Guide

For each app you intend to submit, follow the instructions in each of the following four test groupings and note the behavior. If your app does not pass the assessment criteria listed below, you should fix any of the issues found before submitting your app for final review.
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