Automating Integration Tests To Ensure Android App Quality
Article Summary
Brian Terczynski from Thumbtack reveals how his team eliminated weekly manual QA sessions that were draining engineering time. Their solution? A fully automated integration testing pipeline that catches bugs before production.
Thumbtack's Android team was stuck in a cycle of manual testing: dogfooding new features and weekly QA sessions for regression testing. This process was time-consuming, inconsistent, and only caught bugs right before release. They needed a better approach to ensure app quality without sacrificing developer productivity.
Key Takeaways
- Combined Espresso and UI Automator with BrowserStack for automated testing on real devices
- Tests run against live pre-production backend, catching integration issues early
- Each test creates isolated user data for hermetic, repeatable execution
- Automated tests run multiple times daily plus on every release branch
- Eliminated weekly manual QA sessions while improving test consistency and coverage
Critical Insight
Thumbtack built a complete test pyramid with automated integration tests running several times daily, replacing manual QA sessions and catching backend-breaking changes before production.
