Last week I helped with various workshops for the testingmachine.eu project. The project has implemented virtual machine technology to enable automated web tests to run on various operating systems more easily, without needing physical machines for each platform.

One of the friction points with test automation is the ease of deployment and execution of automated tests each time the codebase is updated. So I decided to try using github and travis-ci to see if we could automatically deploy and run automated tests written using Selenium WebDriver that used Android as the host for the automated tests. If we could achieve this, potentially we’d reduce the friction and the amount of lore people would need to know in order to get their tests to run. I’d some experience of building Android code using travis-ci which provided a good base to work from, since building Android code on travis-ci (and on continuous builds generally) can be fiddly and brittle to changes in the SDK, etc.

From the outset we decided to implement our project in small discrete, traceable steps. The many micro-commits to the codebase are intended to make the steps relatively easy to comprehend (and tweak). They’re public at https://github.com/julianharty/android-webdriver-vm-demo/commits/master. We also configured travis-ci to build this project from the outset to enable us to test the continuous build configuration worked and address any blockages early before focusing on customising the build to run the specific additional steps for Android Selenium WebDriver.

We used git subtree (and optional addition to git) to integrate the existing sample tests from the testingmachine.eu project whilst allowing that project to retain a distinct identity and to make that project easy to replace with ‘your’ code.

There were some fiddly things we needed to address, for instance the newer Android Driver seems to trigger timeouts for the calling code (the automated tests) and this problem took a while to identify and debug. However, within 24 hours the new example git project was ready and working. https://travis-ci.org/julianharty/android-webdriver-vm-demo

I hope you will be able to take advantage of this work and it’ll enable you to run some automated tests emulating requests from Android phones to your web site.  There’s lots of opportunity to improve the implementation – feel free to fork the project on github and improve it 🙂