Instrumentation vs Robotium

What is Instrumentation Testing ?

Android framework includes an integrated testing framework that helps you test all aspects of your application and the SDK tools include tools for setting up and running test applications. 

• Instrumentation testing allows you to verify a particular feature or behaviour with an automated JUnit Test Case.
• Instrumentation class allows you to start and stop Activities, run actions on the user interface thread, send key events and more and make assertions about various UI elements.
• Instrumentation allow you to write test cases to test applications at a much lower level than UI screen shot tests.
• The ActivityInstrumentationTestCase2 class can be used to test access several Activitities.
• ActivityInstrumentationTestCase2 allows to use the full Android system infrastructure.

Drawbacks and limitations using Instrumentation:

• Required to know implementation details
• You often have to manually add Thread.sleep(500) to make tests work
• Large apps can be very complex to test
• Cannot catch UI bugs.
• Tests run slowly
  • Like if it would be done manually
  • Not suitable for TDD

See the sample code to view the difference between Instrumentation and Robitum implementations

Sample Code :

Instrumentation test code to send the input “1 and 2”, press “Add” button and check the result

   1: // Find views   

   2: EditText num1 = (EditText)   

   3: getActivity().findViewById(com.calculator.R.id.num1);   

   4: EditText num2 = (EditText)   

   5: getActivity().findViewById(com.calculator.R.id.num2);   

   6: Button addButton = (Button)   

   7: getActivity().findViewById(com.calculator.R.id.add_button);   

   8:  

   9: // Perform instrumentation commands  

  10: TouchUtils.tapView(this, num1);  

  11: sendKeys(KeyEvent.KEYCODE_1);  

  12: TouchUtils.tapView(this, num2);  

  13: sendKeys(KeyEvent.KEYCODE_2);  

  14: TouchUtils.tapView(this, addButton);  

  15:   

  16: // Fetch result and compare it against expected value  

  17: String actual = num1.getText().toString();  

  18: String expected = "3.0";  

  19: assertEquals("Addition incorrect", expected,actual);

The above logic can be implemented with Robotium as follows,

   1: public void testAdd() {

   2: solo.enterText(0, "1");

   3: solo.enterText(1,“2");

   4: solo.clickOnButton("Add");

   5: assertTrue(solo.searchEditText(“3.0")); 

   6: }