Backing up Android emulator for QA work

Question

I want to take off my programers hat, and put on my QA hat. And since I'm ready to scrap the old development system, and rebuild with updated software, I can tolerate, if needed during the learning experience, a crash and burn of the old system.

One of the most fundamental parts of QA is to take a SNAP SHOT of your current development system (Android Emulator) and save it as a baseline. Run your current (old) system against the base line, input a number of transactions and look at the results, THEN return your test system to the starting point by restoring the baseline, run the new software and same transactions against the same baseline, and make sure your results are the same. If their not the same, then you have either added a bug, (or a new feature.). How can I take a snapshot of the Android Emulator, save it as a base line, run some transactions on the emulator with Production software and then RESTORE the emulator to the state it was in when I took my snapshot and run the same transactions with new Development software? - At this point, LINKS to DOCUMENTATION would probably be best.

Answer 1

Look at the emulator documentation, and I believe you will find that it now supports snapshots. If it doesn't give you a lot of flexibility, you might have to figure out where it puts/expects the snapshot file and copy that from/to your archive before/after runs.

I was going to say that you could as another option build a version of the program with import/export capability. You could install this to import a prepared database, then install a version without which you intended to release, then reinstall the instrumented version to fetch the database back for verification.

Then I remembered you were talking about the emulator where adb runs as root, so you can just adb push/pull database files right to the app's private storage area - though you probably want to make sure the app isn't actually running when you do that. That could potentially give you even more flexibility for fine-grained tests than the whole-device snapshots would.

Answer 2

I use Android X86 for my emulator. This meant that it is run on a virtual machine, which allows me to take a snapshot.

In order to suit your context, a last known configuration can be saved in a snapshot, which can be referred back even in the future if you did not delete it.

After each test, you can easily revert to this snapshot to get the last known configurations.

If you could take some time off in setting up, this might be able to cater your needs.

Answer 3

Install the original app and run the tests. Then, restore the emulator to its original state just use the comman line option

 -wipe-data        reset the user data image (copy it from initdata)

Then you have to install the new app and run the test again.

Answer 4

Emulator snapshot documentation Hope this is what you wanted.