User interface (UI) testing lets you ensure that your app meets its functional requirements and achieves a high standard of quality such that it is more likely to be successfully adopted by users.
One approach to UI testing is to simply have a human tester perform a set of user operations on the target app and verify that it is behaving correctly. However, this manual approach can be time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone. A more efficient approach is to write your UI tests such that user actions are performed in an automated way. The automated approach allows you to run your tests quickly and reliably in a repeatable manner.
Note: It is strongly encouraged that you use Android Studio for building your test apps, because it provides project setup, library inclusion, and packaging conveniences. This class assumes you are using Android Studio.
To automate UI tests with Android Studio, you implement your test code in a separate Android test folder ({@code src/androidTest/java}). The Android Plug-in for Gradle builds a test app based on your test code, then loads the test app on the same device as the target app. In your test code, you can use UI testing frameworks to simulate user interactions on the target app, in order to perform testing tasks that cover specific usage scenarios.
For testing Android apps, you typically create these types of automated UI tests:
The lessons in this class teach you how to use the tools and APIs in the Android Testing Support Library to build these types of automated tests. Before you begin building tests using these APIs, you must install the Android Testing Support Library, as described in Downloading the Android Testing Support Library.