Date: 08/08/2011

Wind River expands Android related software offerings

Wind River, has introduced an Android test development kit designed to assist in the validation of the device user experience by reproducing human interactions to test user interfaces. Wind River UX Test Development Kit is an Eclipse-based test-authoring environment enabling the rapid creation of automated test scripts for Android devices, applications and browser-based web content.

"Among the motives for why consumers return their mobile devices, a top reason is a disappointing user experience. By using breakthrough Wind River innovation to construct efficient testing tools to develop reliable applications and fulfilling user experiences, operators and device manufacturers can create greater customer satisfaction to improve the bottom line," said Cristina Segal, general manager of mobile Linux testing at Wind River. "Wind River is changing the user experience test paradigm. Wind River UX Test Development Kit tests are reusable across hardware configuration and software versions, helping to decrease the effort to build test scripts for new use cases by as much as 70 percent. With access to automatic tests that mimic human behavior during software testing, developers can dramatically reduce testing cycles and time-to-market."

Wind River says that UX Test Development Kit automated tests manipulate the device like a real-world user by interacting with applications through the user interface. For example, a quality assurance engineer can automate scenarios to test the user experience when interacting with graphic interface elements such as dragging items or typing entries on a physical or virtual keyboard and unlike legacy user interface testing solutions, the same test script can be used for Android devices with different hardware characteristics, allowing the quality assurance team to maintain the same test-case database whether the device under test is a smartphone, tablet or any other Android device, as explained by Wind River. Test scripts authored using UX Test Development Kit are fully managed and automatically executed using Wind River Framework for Automated Software Testing (FAST) for Android.

As per Wind River the applications of UX Test Development Kit includes abstract tests for standard Android applications such as browser, camera, contacts, media player and e-mail and also sample test scripts for Android Market applications such as Google Maps, Facebook and Twitter, along with this also allows the rapid creation of test scripts that interact with HTML5 applications and web pages through the native Android browser. To facilitate troubleshooting, UX Test Development Kit tests also run an advanced debugging mechanism to track and more readily identify software issues says Wind River.