Measure application response time/wait for next activity ready in Android?

Question

I am developing an automated test suite to get the timing information for some Android applications (whose source code I do not have access to).

I haven't decided whether to use MonkeyRunner or Robotium yet. My main concern is after I perform an action on the UI (say typed an URL), how to determine when Android has fulfilled my request, all of the next activity's components are ready for use and I am ready to get the result and take the next action (say the page I requested is fully loaded, or email is fully opened).

For web-browser this is simple, I can just use onProgressChaged() or onPageFinished(). But I am looking for a more general way which works for all applications. I think Instrumentation.waitForIdleSync() or Instrumentation.waitForIdle() might be my best bet here.

However, as far as the documentation I read about MonkeyRunner and Robotium, none of them seem to integrate with waitForIdle well. In Robotium I could send some input and then get the output, but there doesn't seem to be a simple way for me to know when the output is ready, and maybe invoke a callback at that point. MonkeyRunner is similar in this aspect, too.

So I wonder is there a simple way for me to know what time my request has been fulfilled (as perceived by the user) without re-implementing Robotium functionality all by my own?

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

This can be very tricky and entirely dependent on what exactly you asked monkeyrunner to do. For example, if you have a monkeyrunner script, and issued a command to launch calculator app, you can have a python subprocess monitoring adb logcat -b events output to determine whether calculator app has been launched or not. If you are asking to press a button in the calculator, you can have a sleep of 1 or 2 seconds.

But there is no direct way to determine whether android has processed your event or not. Simply because, every operation differs and takes its own time.

Answer 2

You can put asserts in robotium and then use system.nanoseconds() before and after like a timer.

This might be a easy way to get timing information