Espresso Testing Framework - Introduction

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In general, mobile automation testing is a difficult and challenging task. Android availability for different devices and platforms makes it things tedious for mobile automation testing. To make it easier, Google took on the challenge and developed Espresso framework. It provides a very simple, consistent and flexible API to automate and test the user interfaces in an android application. Espresso tests can be written in both Java and Kotlin, a modern programming language to develop android application.

The Espresso API is simple and easy to learn. You can easily perform Android UI tests without the complexity of multi-threaded testing. Google Drive, Maps and some other applications are currently using Espresso.

Features of Espresso

Some the salient features supported by Espresso are as follow,

• Very simple API and so, easy to learn.

• Highly scalable and flexible.

• Provides separate module to test Android WebView component.

• Provides separate module to validate as well as mock Android Intents.

• Provides automatic synchronization between your application and tests.

Advantages of Espresso

Let us now what the benefits of Espresso are.

• Backward compatibility

• Easy to setup.

• Highly stable test cycle.

• Supports testing activities outside application as well.

• Supports JUnit4

• UI automation suitable for writing black box tests.