Android Netbeans Blackbox, Whitebox, or both Test Driven Development

Question

I'm working with Android in Netbeans and trying to decide which testing framework to implement for my application (I've never done TDD in Android before). I've been using this thread to look into different resources. I'm mainly familiar with whitebox, so I feel that I would be more comfortable with the built-in Instrumentation Framework. However, this is the first time I've heard of blackbox testing (Robotium), but it looks like it would be really useful as well. Is it common practice to implement both whitebox and blackbox tests? Or is only one really necessary? If both, what things are best to be whitebox tested and which are best to be blackbox tested? Or is this a totally useless question as it's completely application dependent and I should just pick one and start messing with it?

[EDIT]: I also want to add that I don't have any experience with JUnit since a lot of explanations seem to assume a basic understanding of it.

Answer 1

The two options you suggest (Instrumentation and Robotium) are actually pretty much the same thing, the closes to whitebox (or true tdd/unit tests would probably be roboelectric).

Is it common to do both? Yes i think that is usually a good approach normally you want to test things as low down as possible and then have fewer of the big blackbox tests, android doesn't make this the easiest if you ask me though so you may have more luck with the instrumentation/robotium tests cases as these are fairly easy to understand and they match up with what you can see on the screen fairly easily.

With regards to junit, android is bundled with junit3 which has much less features/complexity as jUnit4, and for the most part the only thing you will need to know is to name your testmethods with the word "test" in front of it e.g. public void testXXX().