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Developing Android apps can be hard...without the right tools and patterns in your back pocket.

I had a chance to sit with Sam Edwards (@handstandsam) to talk about some of the work that went into his presentation at Droidcon Boston last week. There are a bunch of tools outside in out-of-box Android stack that I wasn't aware of (see below), but Sam quickly educated us. His full talk will be available in a few weeks once the conference dust settles.

Improving the Espresso Testing Landscape

Afterwards, Sam and I went for a stroll down Tremont and discussed some patterns people were applying to simplify writing Espresso tests.

Shauvik Roy Choudhary who I met at last year's Capital One Android Summit has produced some great work around Testing Robots (slides and code). This is not to be confused with Jake Wharton's work on (also named) Testing Robots, equally awesome and worth your time reviewing if you haven't already. Shauvik also produced Barista, which you can find in the app store.

Related note: in recent StackOverflow work, I found out about another cool project called Barista, a library of wicked helpful functions for Espresso testing by Rafa Vázquez, Roc Boronat, and Sergi Martínez.

Great to see people sharing their experiences and lessons learned so we don't have to toil on them ourselves.

Android debug and design tools that Sam covered: