Learning Path: Android: Test-Driven Android App Development

See the first steps to building fast and dynamic Android apps employing test-driven development

What you'll learn
Leverage well known, best practices for Android app development
Use the best third-party libraries in the business which are not known to developers at the beginner-intermediate level
Understand why test driven design is important
Write reusable test components with behavior driven design
Use plugins that enhance the testing experience
Learn Android-specific test frameworks, including UI tests
Requirements
Requires basic knowledge of programming in Java.
Basic familiarity with the Android environment and ecosystem
Description
Packt’s Video Learning Paths are a series of individual video products put together in a logical and stepwise manner such that each video builds on the skills learned in the video before i
Android Nougat is the 7th major version of the Android operating system. Test-driven development enables good design. It only makes sense to adopt it for Android N app development. Sounds interesting? Let’s see how easy it is!


Nougat introduces notable changes to the operating system and its development platform, including the ability to display multiple apps on-screen at once in a split-screen view, support for inline replies to notifications, an OpenJDK-based Java environment, support for the Vulkan graphics rendering API, and "seamless" system updates on supported devices. Good object-oriented design and test-driven design are complementary and this Learning Path will explain how.


This Learning Path covers the fundamentals of app development in Android N including the Android Studio and Android SDK, networking concepts with the API, Firebase analytics and crash analysis, and publishing your application on the Play Store. We will then look in detail how test-driven development can be implemented for building apps in Android.


The goal of this Learning Path is to help you build an application for Android Nougat, using the latest features of Android. We will focus on individual app modules and teach you to implement different TDD methods to create reliable and smarter apps in less time.


This Learning Path is authored by some of the best in their fields.


Soham Mondal

Soham Mondal has worked with Android for about 4 years now and his own app Skyro Voice Recorder has around half a million downloads on the Play Store and has been featured there a couple of times. Apart from that, he has consulted with a bunch of start-ups on Android/UX and was an organizer with Blrdroid, one of the largest Android groups in the world.


Brandan Jones

Brandan Jones has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor for the University of Cincinnati since the 2000-2001 school year. He has taught many courses in programming, from introductory programming to full stack development.


Brandan proposed and created the first Android programming course at the University of Cincinnati, and has been teaching it ever since. He reapplied this course and taught it at Northwestern University’s School of Continuing Studies as well.


Brandan is the creator of the Android app PlantPlaces Mobile, which allows users to search for plants by color, and GPS plants. He wrote this app in 2012, using TDD principles. He has used selected JSON feeds from that app in the examples in this video course.

Brandan’s mix of both academic and professional experience means that he brings real-world concepts to the classroom. Most of his high level classes include hands on experience with unit testing, scrum, and distributed version control systems.

Overview

Section 1: Learning Android N Application Development

Lecture 1 The Course Overview

Lecture 2 Why Android N?

Lecture 3 Basics of Android

Lecture 4 Anatomy of Our app

Lecture 5 Tools Overview

Lecture 6 Tools – Android Studio and Emulators

Lecture 7 UI Section Overview

Lecture 8 Hello World

Lecture 9 Home Page Card

Lecture 10 Home Page Card Implementation

Lecture 11 NewsArticle, Adapters, and RecyclerView

Lecture 12 Creating a NewsArticle

Lecture 13 Implementing the ArrayAdapter

Lecture 14 Implementing the RecyclerView

Lecture 15 The Details Page

Lecture 16 Event Handling and Navigation

Lecture 17 Enabling Navigation

Lecture 18 Android N Multiwindow Features

Lecture 19 Networking Section Overview

Lecture 20 Networking Basics

Lecture 21 News API

Lecture 22 Parsing the News API Response

Lecture 23 Parsing the News API Response – Implementation

Lecture 24 Retrofit

Lecture 25 Retrofit Implementation

Lecture 26 Testing API calls

Lecture 27 Connecting the Response to the UI

Lecture 28 Analytics and More

Lecture 29 Analytics and Crash Reporting Implementation

Lecture 30 Addition Attribution

Lecture 31 Introduction to Testing in Android

Lecture 32 Unit Testing in Android

Lecture 33 Unit Testing with Powermock

Lecture 34 Instrumentation Testing in Android

Lecture 35 Espresso Implementation

Lecture 36 Preparing to Upload to the Play Store

Lecture 37 Uploading to the Play Store

Lecture 38 Best Practices

Lecture 39 Review of the Project

Section 2: Test-Driven Android

Lecture 40 The Course Overview

Lecture 41 Why Test-Driven Design?

Lecture 42 The Testing Pyramid

Lecture 43 Behavior-Driven Development

Lecture 44 Android Project Structure

Lecture 45 Best Practices – Interfaces, DTOs, and Layers

Lecture 46 Why Interfaces?

Lecture 47 DTO Best Practices

Lecture 48 Layer Description – UI, Business Logic, and Data Access

Lecture 49 Minimizing If Tests

Lecture 50 JUnit Syntax

Lecture 51 JUnit Annotations

Lecture 52 Example with Setup and Teardown

Lecture 53 Design for Test

Lecture 54 Create a Test-driven Design Test

Lecture 55 Given, when, and then syntax

Lecture 56 Example – Given, When, and Then

Lecture 57 Extended Given, When, and Then Test

Lecture 58 More Asserts

Lecture 59 More Assert Examples

Lecture 60 Hamcrest Asserts

Lecture 61 Remove Dependencies with Mockito

Lecture 62 Mockito Example

Lecture 63 Technical Debt

Lecture 64 Unit Test Code Coverage in Android Studio

Lecture 65 Build environment

Lecture 66 Android Instrumentation Test

Lecture 67 Android Instrumentation Test Example

Lecture 68 Espresso Overview

Lecture 69 Example Espresso Test

Lecture 70 Firebase Test Lab

If you know Java in depth and have built applications with the language but not apps for Android devices, then this Learning Path is for you. Android developers wanting to learn and leverage test-driven development in their app development will also find this Learning Path useful.