Annyce Davis

Davis Technology Consulting

Google I/O 2016 Recap

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This was my second time attending Google I/O and it was once again a great experience. I put together a few highlights of the event below:

Venue

So the event took place at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California. It was my first time in Mountain View and it’s such a beautiful city. On Day 1 of the conference it was a bit “toasty” outside so that proved to be challenging, but eventually the remaining days were pleasant and breezy. The majority of the talks took place inside tents and there tended to be a lot of interest on the part of attendees.

Attendees

For me one of the best parts of attending I/O this year was getting to meet so many of the people that I have interacted with online. Most of them were really cool people and managed to keep their spirits up despite putting up with the heat and long lines.

Takeaways

I was completely impressed with the updates to Android Studio. Some of the things that I felt would be nice to haves, like showing Gradle dependencies clearly or having the Espresso Test Recorder were released. Definitely one of the major highlights for me.
 

 

Something that surprised me though was how Firebase has become the de facto standard of all things mobile for Google. In fact, several products were renamed “Firebase X, Y, Z”. The following tweet summarizes it best:


 

Also there were several talks on developing applications for emerging markets. I especially enjoyed the one titled, “Building for Billions”. The speakers talked about the best strategies for making sure your application is always interactive and responsive for users regardless of network and memory conditions.

All in all, I am very thankful I was able to attend; I know that everyone doesn’t get this opportunity. I learned a lot, I drank a lot of coffee, and I met some awesome folks.



Make sure you subscribe to my newsletter to keep up with my Android Adventures. Until next year…

Talk: Screen Robots UI Testing with Espresso

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Often when writing tests with Espresso you find a lot of onView, withId, perform calls scattered throughout your test methods. This takes away from the simplicity of the test, tends to be verbose and also litters resource ids everywhere. There’s got to be a better way, right? Yes, there is…Screen Robots. In this presentation you will learn how to take advantage of the Screen Robot abstraction technique.

It covers: UI Testing, Basic Espresso, and Screen Robots

Materials

 
If you would like to learn more about creating high quality Android applications, I encourage you to check out my video course and bite-sized video content on Caster.io.

The Blerg Podcast Chat

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I was recently a guest on The Blerg podcast. It’s a podcast that focuses on the various technologies in the Android ecosystem, featuring famed developer of Action Launcher, +Chris Lacy.

During our chat, we talked all about Android TV, Google’s solution for streaming devices in your home. We also talked a bit about what we would love to see in the way of additions to Android TV in the future. I spent several years developing for Google TV and Android TV, it was certainly a unique experience from typical Android application development. At any rate, I wanted to share some of the highlights of our chat with you.

Highlights


[02:10]: We briefly mention some of the challenges developing for the older Google TV devices.

[05:00]: Discussing the differences between the Google TV remote and the Nexus Player remote.

[08:35]: Chris talks about his experience with the Sony TV.

[13:00]: My main use case for the Nexus Player is a Chromecast YouTube Party.

[15:25]: We talk about how much I loved the Chrome Browser on the old Google TV devices.

[17:15]: Chris starts discussing the “Recommendations” feature of the Android TV.

[19:00]: We talk about the things we like/dislike about the Android TV Launcher.

[24:50]: I talk a bit about Apple TV and the look-and-feel of the applications.

[29:40]: Learned about a new game that I can play on Android TV, Crossy Road.

[31:10]: Another feature we’d love, suggested/new apps to aid in discoverability.

[33:20]: Shout out to my favorite show, Murder She Wrote, which it watch endlessly on Netflix.

[37:10]: Our take on apps that are installed by default, like Netflix.

[39:10]: I talk about developing for Android TV, huge improvement over Google TV.

[41:10]: The one thing I’d love to see with Android TV is having it integrated with my cable provider.

Hope you enjoyed the episode!

Testing Tricks #5 – Using Screen Robots with Espresso

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In this presentation by a developer at Square: “Software Quality/Automation Testing”, he discussed how they take advantage of Robots to make it easier to update tests whenever UI elements change, as well as a few additional benefits. This is a very useful abstraction technique for when you’re writing large numbers of tests in Espresso. So let’s look at an example of using a Screen Robot to test a simple login flow.

Before Using a Screen Robot

So the above code is how you would typically make use of Espresso, where you have multiple calls to onView() and reference the resource ids directly in each test. Two main drawbacks of this approach is that 1) if you need to change the ids in the future you have to update multiple tests, and 2) it’s not very clear from first glance what you’re attempting to accomplish in a given test due to the Espresso calls. So now let’s look at the same example, this time using Screen Robots.

Notice how the test method is more succinct and more easily conveys what we are trying to do, namely login with a given username and password and then make sure that it was a success. This includes the code for our LoginScreenRobot. This allows us to have a thin abstraction layer over the Espresso calls by extending our base ScreenRobot class. Hope you found this short testing tip helpful!

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