How To Use Firebase Test Lab To Test Android Apps

What is the Test Lab?

Test Lab provides us the functionality to test our Apps on a pool of Android devices. It provides the environment to upload APK and select devices to run. We do not need to have a physical device to run our app and test it. As there is a lot of variation on Android devices and sometimes the app's behavior changes on a newer version of Android devices. To test this behavior, we can run a test on Test Lab instead of buying that particular Android device and running the app on it.

How to use Test Lab

The test lab provides a type of test called the Robo Test. It is an intelligence test that runs automatically on the APK we uploaded but does not log in and deep dive into the app until we provide the credentials.

How to make a particular test case and run it on Test lab

First, create a firebase console account by going on this link https://console.firebase.google.com and creating a project if not created already. Go to the test lab under the Quality section.

How To Use Firebase Test Lab To Test Android Apps

Click on Test Lab and a new window will open on the right side. Upload app APK here and the first time, the test runs on the latest Android device automatically. But it will be a generic test and not a deep dive test of the app and not your desired test. To run a test of your desired functionality, you need to record a Robo Script and use that with the app APK. I am going to explain step by step how to record a Robo Script from Android Studio and run that on Test Lab.

Step 1

Open Android Studio.

Step 2

Open the desired project in Android Studio.

Step 3

Click on the Tool in the Top Menu Bar, and click on Firebase.

A Firebase Assistant will open on the right side.

Click on "Test Lab" and you will see these two options.

Click on the second option ‘Record Robo Script and use it Guide Robo Test’.

It will show as the below screen, now click on the first option, Record Robo Script.

It will ask you to select a device/emulator to run a script.

Select a device or emulator.

When APK installs in-app start recording the script.

As you do the actions these are recorded as in the given image.

When you finish your recording click on Ok. It will ask you to save the Robo Script in the JSON file format. Save it.

Step 4

Now open Firebase console.

Go to Quality and click on Test Lab.

Click on Run a Test and select Run a Robo test.

A window will open to upload APK and script.

Step 5

Upload APK and Robo Script here and click on continue.

Select the device/devices you want to run the test on and click on the Start Test. You can run more than one test at the same time.

Robo test will be started, when it finishes, an email will be sent to you and status will be shown on the console. Click on the test, after that click on the device.

It will show you all the logs, screenshots, video, and performance, etc. If there is a crash in the app, it will show that crash in logs with complete details as crashlytics.

Summary

In this article, we learned about How To Use Firebase Test Lab To Test Android Apps.