Test smarter, not harder: new testing strategies documentation

We work closely with many teams and one thing they all have in common is a justified growing focus on automated testing. More features, more form factors, and more supported Android releases make tests increasingly important. These guides don’t focus on testing more, but on testing thoughtfully so that bugs are caught early in the development process and teams waste less time debugging issues in production or flaky tests.

The new pages are more opinionated and present the testing strategy followed by Google apps: a 5-layer pyramid that is adaptable to the specific needs of your app and team.

We released 7 new pages:

• Emphasis on developer productivity: Our updated documentation highlights how a well-defined (1) testing strategy can improve your development workflow by identifying issues early in the development cycle.
• Selecting the Right Test Types: We’ve included additional guidance on important test types, including (2) screenshot and (3) performance tests, and how to choose the most appropriate one for different scenarios. We also incorporated the term “behavior” test for those UI tests that don’t take screenshots.
• Industry best practices: You can’t test at scale with flaky tests. We have added recommendations on improving the (4) stability of big tests and strategies to improve reliability with tools like (5) Robolectric.
• Avoiding regressions in different screen sizes: Regressions in large screens are very common, so it’s crucial to have automated tests for large screens. We added (6) testing strategy recommendations and (7) tools to catch these issues.

We encourage you to review the updated documentation and begin incorporating these best practices into your projects. Your feedback is always welcome, so please leave a comment with your thoughts on the changes and how we can continue to improve our guidance.

Happy testing!