Research On Android-based Keyword-driven Automated Testing Framework

With the development of science and technology, smart phones become increasinglypopular and gradually become the mainstream of mobile phone market. Mobile phone is nolonger limited to a simple communication tool, but terminal equipment with variety offeatures. Such as Symbian, Android, Widows Mobile and Max OS X are the majorsmartphone operating systems at the moment, while Android quickly becamepopular around the world with its open-source, expanding and portability. In February2012, Android accounted for52.5%of the global smartphone operating systemmarket share. The number of App in Android Market has more than450,000and monthlydownloads have reach one billion. However, compared with the rapid development of theAndroid development, the testing techniques have lagged far behind. Most softwarecompanies on the Android test using the traditional manual testing methods. Manualtesting will be limited by many factors, and not conducive to large-scale regression testing.Although there have been a variety of sophisticated software automation testing framework,most of them are for Java or C++, C#but less for Android. Activity Instrumentation,Robotium, Robolectric and TMTS are the major automated testing frameworks or tools forAndroid applications. These automated testing framework need to be tested by writing testcode to execute test cases, which make the tests inefficient.To solve the above problem, this paper analyzes the advantages anddisadvantages of the existing Android open source testing framework,propose keyword-driven test automation framework based on the Android. The frameworkre-encapsulates the Robotium and ported keyword-driven software testing technology tothe Android test. It is able to import the test cases directly from the data files, whichseparates the test data and test code and reduces the coupling of the test data and test code.Also designs a reusable keyword library for Android GUI testing. What’s more, test reportsand code coverage reports can be generated and export automatically, which maketesters more intuitively to analyse the test results.Practical experience has shown that this framework has enhanced theexploitability and maintainability of automated test. The development of test cases is to thedesign of test data, keywords determines the action and the steps of the test cases. Theautomation test framework and keyword-driven test code has been applied to actualprojects, improved test efficiency, and get higher investment returns.