What is Espresso in the first place?
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Let's discuss Espresso for Android. What is its use for a test automation engineer? What drawbacks does the tool have?
It is a tool for testing the UI of Android applications developed and supported by Google. Although this tool is positioned more as an Android developer’s tool for white/grey-box testing, it can be quite efficiently used by test automation engineers for grey/black-box as well.
It can shift UI tests from their sad place at the top of the testing pyramid a bit closer to its base – as most UI tests are slow and costly (see https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TestPyramid.html).
Visual comparison of different tools according to their speed and reliability looks like this (the values are taken from [3]):
Note to the diagram: “Fallibility = 1 for UIAutomator does not mean that 100% tests fail with it, instead, it means that this tool with the highest number of fails was taken for 100%. If we take the absolute ratio of failed tests to launched tests, for UIAutomator it is 7.58%, and for Espresso it is 0.06%. These 7.85% do not look like a huge number, but if the number of tests is, say, 500, about 40 tests will fail, and dealing with all 40 will take time.
Below is a screenshot of Android Studio with Android Wear emulator open and calculator running. The Android Studio window shows the code that the recorder has generated for the simplest test case – “check that 1+2=3”.
After some refactoring the test will look as follows:
@Test
public void mainActivityTest2() {
onView(withId(R.id.digit_1)).perform(click());
onView(withId(R.id.op_add)).perform(click());
onView(withId(R.id.digit_2)).perform(click());
onView(withId(R.id.eq)).perform(click());
onView(allOf(Matchers.instanceOf(android.widget.EditText.class),
withText("3"))).check(matches(isDisplayed()));
If the task is to cover an Android application with automated UI tests, and you have access to the application source code – Espresso will be the most optimal tool due to its speed and reliability.
Yevgen is Senior Test Engineer / Test Automation Engineer who is persistently looking for more efficient ways for testing-related tasks automation.
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