Paul Blundell - Learning Android Application Testing

Paul Blundell is an aspiring software craftsman and senior Android developer at Novoda. Before Novoda, he worked at AutoTrader and Thales, with apps that he released racking up over one million downloads. A strong believer in software craftsmanship, SOLID architecture, clean code, and testing, Paul has used this methodology to successfully nurture and create many Android applications. These include the Tesco launcher app, which was preinstalled for the recently released Hudl2 tablet; MUBI, a unique film streaming service; and the AutoTrader UK car search app.

If anyone wants to provide feedback, you can always tweet to him @blundell_apps. He also likes to write, so you can find more material at http://blog.blundellapps.com/.

I'd like to thank everyone at Novoda for being great guys/gals and helping each other all the time to learn and develop. Without the atmosphere of craftsmanship and constant learning, my skills and this book would not have been possible. Also, I'd like to thank my girlfriend for her endless patience. Every time she asked me to help her out, I'd give her the excuse of writing my book. Well, no more excuses because it is finished!

I'd like to acknowledge the legacy author of this book Diego Torres Milano for doing a great job. The chapters outlined are down to your insight into the world of testing on Android, and I hope my rewrite lives up to your ideals.

Finally, I'd like to thank all the people who don't know me but from whom I've learnt a lot. If you, as the reader, want a list of other authors for further research, this is it: Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, Robert C Martin, Romain Guy, Reto Meier, Mark Murphy, Eric Evans, Joshua Block, Ward Cunningham, Kevin Rutherford, JB Rainsberger, and Sandro Mancuso.

Diego Torres Milano has been involved with the Android platform since its inception, by the end of 2007, when he started exploring and researching the platform's possibilities, mainly in the areas of user interfaces, unit and acceptance tests, and Test-driven Development.

This is reflected by a number of articles mainly published on his personal blog (http://dtmilano.blogspot.com), and his participation as a lecturer in some conferences and courses, such as Mobile Dev Camp 2008 in Amsterdam (Netherlands) and Japan Linux Symposium 2009 (Tokyo), Droidcon London 2009, and Skillsmatter 2009 (London, UK). He has also authored Android training courses delivered to various companies in Europe.

Previously, he was the founder and developer of several open source projects, mainly CULT Universal Linux Thin Project (http://cult-thinclient.sf.net) and the very successful PXES Universal Linux Thin Client project (that was later acquired by 2X Software, http://www.2x.com). PXES is a Linux-based operating system specialized for thin clients, used by hundreds of thousands of thin clients all over the world. This project has a popularity peak of 35 million hits and 400K downloads from SourceForge in 2005. This project had a dual impact. Big companies in Europe decided to use it because of improved security and efficiency; and organizations, institutions, and schools in some development countries in South America, Africa, and Asia decided to use it because of the minimal hardware requirements, having a huge social impact of providing computers, sometimes recycled ones, to everyone.

Among the other open source projects that he founded are Autoglade, Gnome-tla, and JGlade, and he has contributed to various Linux distributions, such as RedHat, Fedora, and Ubuntu.

He has also given presentations at the LinuxWorld, LinuxTag, GUADEC ES, University of Buenos Aires, and so on.

Diego has also developed software, participated in open source projects, and advised companies worldwide for more than 15 years.

He can be contacted at <>.