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This first post is dedicated to a wonderfull tool => Monkey!

If you had never heard of this tool, your life is turning better now. Monkey is a simple tool which allow to generate pseudo-random gestures, on a device or on an emulator. Shortly, you can in a few seconds simulate a user using your application, but a pretty stupid one (just as all users ?) because all his actions will be generated randomly. These actions won’t make any sense, but the aim here is to detect bugs in your app, and this can be very useful. Note 1: This is absolutely not a substitute to other tests you should do (like unit tests…). Do what I say, not what I do :p

Note 2: For this tut, I suppose you have one emulator or a device connected in debug mode (with ADB drivers installed). I won’t detail this part.

Here we go, launching cmd, and browsing to [android-sdk-path]**/platform-tools. The basic command to use monkey is the following:

adb shell monkey <options>

For example, if your application package is com.myapp and you want to generate 1000 gestures, with a delay of 500ms between each event, you have to use this command:

adb shell monkey -p com.myapp --throttle 500 -v 1000

The list of all the options is available here.

Going further…

If you want to go one step further, you can automate a lot of things ,like the installation on the device, the launch, screenshots, etc. with the monkeyrunner tool

I hope you enjoyed my first tutorial, do not hesitate to comment if you have any question or share it if you liked it!