Develop Reference

How to use Appium Espresso with a Xamarin Forms app

I'm attempting to add some test automation to my XF app, but I'm having some difficulty as I've never used Appium before so I'm hoping that someone with experience may be able to help with my issues.
When I'm setting up my tests - if I set the "automationName" to be "UiAutomator2", then I can launch my app without problems and interact with the UI fine.
I need to do some tests with specific methods inside my app, but Appium only allows interaction with the UI. Doing some searching, I found that Appium contains an Espresso driver which is supposed to allow interaction with specific methods (this sounds exactly what I'm after).
The suggestion is to change the "automationName" from "UiAutomator2" to "Espresso" - the example I was going through in the Appium documentation was a simple test that just launched the app. It suggested that just by changing this setting, that the same test would work regardless.
I have created a simple test that just launches my app - this works fine with "UiAutomator2" but as soon as I change to "Espresso", my app doesn't launch.
The Appium server mentions not being able to find the signed .apk.
According to the documentation, this should all be working fine but as it isn't I'm guessing that there's something else that I need to do so I'm hoping that someone with experience with this will be able to help me get the tests to work.
I don't know whether I need to add a reference to Espresso somewhere in my XF app or if I need to build the .apk in a special way that will make it work.
Any advice or help on this matter would be grateful.

IMHO there are better options to achieve what you want. I'd always test the methods that are not platform specific separately, e.g. with with NUnit. You can run Unit- and Integration-Tests created with NUnit with the NUnit GUI or ReSharper if you've got a license. Unless you are using very exotic functions (or relying on timings, etc.) this should work well across all platforms.
If you are not sure that your methods will behave the same across all platforms (better to be sure), I'd create a separate App that runs tests on those methods on an actual device. There is a runner for NUnit-Tests for Xamarin.Forms, you could use for this purpose. The last release is from 2017, but I'd give it a shot. This way you can make sure that your methods work as intended, but avoid having to access them via a framework that is aimed at UI-tests.

Mocking android applications like the contacts app using Mockito

I am trying to write functional tests for an android application. The problem is that most functional testing frameworks that I have explored (calabash-android, robotium) have a limitation on the number of activities from different applications that can be tested in the same test. So if in one workflow I need to select some contacts from the android contact picker I cant test that entire flow because the contact picker activity is part of the android contacts application and the framework can't test an activity from my application and the contacts application at the same time.
One possible solution my team thought of was to mock out the call to the contacts activity to return a dummy intent with contact information so that our application workflow can be tested. We are trying to use mockito to achieve this. However I am stuck pretty early on. Here is what I am trying to do
MyActivity mockActivity = mock(MyActivity.class);
when(mockActivity.startActivityForResult(<?>,anyInt())).thenReturn(fakeIntent);
I am not sure what to put in the first parameter in the second line. I have tried Intent.class and android.content.Intent.class however it throws a compile error. If anyone has worked with mocking activities using mockito, some help will be greatly appreciated.
P.S. - If I understand correctly mocking is used more in unit testing than functional testing. So these tests would be more of a hybrid. If anyone has a better suggestion on how to go about these functional tests on android I am all ears.

It's hard to answer this without knowing the signature of your startActivityForResult method, but the general idea is to use any(Xxx.class), where Xxx is the type of the parameter. So either
when(mockActivity.startActivityForResult(any(Xxx.class),anyInt())).thenReturn(fakeIntent);
or the (kind of equivalent)
doReturn(fakeIntent).when(mockActivity).startActivityForResult(any(Xxx.class),anyInt());

The issue is that you cannot really "mock" (actually "spy") on the activity you're testing since it is created out of your control by Android's instrumentation code. In a unit-test environment where you would have control, you could follow the mock(MyActivity.class) or spy(myActivityInstance) path (spy would actually be better because you could re-use most of the activity's original implementation), but here not.
The only solution I found for this dilemma was to move certain functionality out of the activity into utility classes, ideally utilizing roboguice for that (#ContextSingletons can be used to process activity results). Then, in your test project, you would create your own test guice injector, set that as base application injector before you call getActivity() for the first time and then let the activity work on your mocked utility class.
I outlined the complete process here.

Testing android applications

I'm new to testing.I've developed a application,now i need to test.I googled about testing for some time,learnt ,what different types of testing are there in general.I wrote few test cases.
Three things,i would like to know,
Is there any different types of testing for android,if yes,can you give me some links which could help me to refer.
How do generally a android user test his apps,Will he uses test frame works or generally write test cases and testing that on real phone to see how they are performing.
Is there any sample test cases written document which will give me some basic idea.

For integration testing I use Robotium. It is a nice convenient layer on top of the build in instrumentation testing. These Tests need to be running in an emulator or on a real device. It is recommended in both cases to have an extra test project (producing an additional APK) that depends on the project under test.
Personally I like to partition my app so I have one or more libraries that do not depend on Android specific classes and can therefore be tested in a regular JVM using JUnit.
There is a third way to test and that is by mocking the android classes and have the tests run in a JVM. I have not yet used it but I hear Roboelectric is a framework that allows for this kind of testing.

Android Monkey tool can be a handy little tool. I find it handy the pseudo random fashion is handy for generating unusual use cases.
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/monkey.html

Is there any frameworks for integration testing of Android apps which can drive emulator/device beyond one app

I found couple of difference frameworks which can test Android apps, but all of them are limited on testing of just one app (because mainly they use Instrumentation)
My app contains a service which could be called by other apps and I want to automate testing of this too. So, I would like to be able to write some tests which automate UI in other apps.
Have you seen anything, except MonkeyRunner? I looked at it, but the API is quite poor.

Take a look at Sikuli IDE it's easy enough to use and is based on Python.
You can bascially run integration tests using it, (kind of like Selenium for desktops).
There is also Selenium Android Driver if you want to run automaton tests from the Android WebView!

You are right, a bare monkeyrunner is perhaps not enough, but if you combine it with other tools perhaps you can find your way. For example, AndroidViewClient is a library that adds the ability of:
finding Views by ID, very much like you normally do in your Android Activity (using ViewClient.findViewById())
obtaining the value for almost any of the Views properties (using for example View.isChecked() or View.mText())
sending touch events to the Views by simply invoking View.touch()
More details an a complete example can be found at http://dtmilano.blogspot.com/2012/02/monkeyrunner-interacting-with-views.html

Android, how to get information on which activity is currently showing (in foregorund)?

I wonder if there is a way to get information on which activity currently has focus (is in the foreground)? I am using instrumentation and I would like to know which activity is currently running in the application that I am testing against.
Thanks

Take a look at Robotium
'a open-source test framework created to make automatic black-box testing of Android applications significantly faster and easier than what is possible with Android instrumentation tests out-of-the-box.'
Homepage:
http://www.robotium.org/
Source:
http://github.com/jayway/robotium
Please note that the Robotium project is maintained by the company I work for