Everybody Tests

"I told you. I wake up every day, right here, right in Punxsutawney, and it's always February 2nd, and there's nothing I can do about it." ~ Phil Connors, Groundhog Day The life of a tester involves a lot of repetition. In even ideal environments where you can focus mainly on exploration (rather than rote, unthinking execution of endless, soul-crushing test case minutia) you will still find the need to repeat some of the same tasks many times. Some of those tasks are mechanical and serve an operational purpose (e.g. deploying a fresh environment in which to play). These you can script away to great effect (and I'll detail some of how I do that on mobile devices in a different post). Other tasks are more for communication such as generating detailed, informative bug reports. This is typically viewed as the bread and butter of a tester's life. Whether you see it that way or not, there is value in recognizing the structure of those reports and automating a...

I love monkeys; the way they look like us, the way they act like naughty children, even the way they're misused as analogs for random-event-generators in statistical metaphors. When it comes to the Android platform, we have a very naughty monkey of our own: the UI Exerciser Monkey . On the one hand it is extremely useful to have an off-the-shelf option for random UI stress testing. On the other hand the monkey is kind of limited in some of its capabilities (e.g. it gets stuck if it hits a login/logout page and the app doesn't use the " isUserAMonkey() method wisely on click listeners) and scary in others (e.g. potentially dialing phone numbers, sending emails, cranking on music, taking unnecessary screenshots, etc). What the monkey DOES provide is a dumb event generator that flails with swipes, touches, and keypresses. What the monkey DOES NOT do is spider your app, carefully looking for dead-ends, traps, and unhandled touch states. In my typical dealings with the UI ...