Mumbai: Security giant Kaspersky in a major move has decided to provide an open access to its Android automated testing tool Kaspresso to developers.
“We decided to make the Kaspresso framework publicly available as the creation of a framework for auto-tests requires a lot of effort and resources,” said Victor Yablokov, Head of Mobile Products Development – Kaspersky.
“Furthermore, self-testing tools for Android simplify mobile developers’ lives,” added Yablokov.
Kaspersky’s Android app testing tool Kaspresso is now publicly available to the community of mobile app developers.
“We tried to combine the best resources and practices into one tool and put our own best practices and experience into it. We hope that with the help of Kaspresso, mobile developers will create better and more reliable Android applications,” commented Yablokov.
“We also consider that users and the entire industry will benefit from this,” he expected.
Kaspersky’s Kaspresso tool
The Kaspresso tool has flexible settings with ease of use, allowing mobile developers to significantly reduce the application testing time without overlooking any bugs. Thus, it helps to speed up the application testing and its release process.
The tool has already received positive feedback at two major technology conferences – Mobilization IX and Codemotion Berlin 2019.
Challenges for mobile app developers
For mobile developers it is quite challenging to pick a suitable automated testing tool that can reduce the lead time for an application’s release. Nowadays, there are many frameworks and tools for conducting automated tests, such as Espresso and Appium.
Mobile Apps Testing Frameworks
However, these frameworks can’t solve all problems of Android developers like their concerns around readability, flakiness, logging and architecture of UI-tests. The issues prevent mobile developers from writing clean, stable, maintainable, and understandable UI-tests.
To solve existing problems with the convenience of UI tests, Kaspersky has introduced a new Android app testing tool, named Kaspresso. The tool is based on two libraries for creating automated Android tests – Espresso and Kakao.
With Kakao library’s inclusion, serving as DSL wrapper over Espresso, Kaspresso improves the readability of UI-tests, test descriptions and makes them easy to understandable.
Kaspresso also solves the problem with flaky tests and logging. Flaky tests are cases in which the test result is unpredictable. And has different reasoning behind each failure, despite the functionality working without malfunctions on the developer’s device.
As for Espresso’s existing logging problems, as it does not log its actions, the new tool can show all Espresso activities. Moreover, the user can modify them further.
Therefore, the tool provides a simple and convenient way to manage interceptors – the entry point for all API requests that tests call. Kaspresso presents a rich set of default interceptors for handling flaky tests and improving the logging process.
Kaspresso offers the best practices which mobile developers gained through many years of experience. The framework includes architecture recommendations to unify and standardize UI-tests.
(Image source – Kaspersky blog)