Amazon has introduced its new AWS Device Farm, a mobile test farm targeting the Android and Fire OS ecosystem that provides a growing collection of more than 200 unique environments, says Amazon, and integration with major testing automation frameworks and CI systems.
AWS Device Farm allows users to select and control the state of testing devices, e.g., by uploading files, installing additional apps, setting networking capabilities, location, etc. Once the tests have been run, it provides useful information to identify any problems, such as:
- screenshots
- CPU and memory utilization, together with thread count
- output files.
AWS Device Farm supports integration with popular test automation frameworks such as Appium, Calabash, or uiautomator. Furthermore, it can also run instrumentation tests using JUnit, Robotium, or Espresso.
All the steps required to run a test can be automated using the Device Farm API, which allows users to create projects and device pools, to upload files, run a test or schedule it, and collect all relevant information afterwards. For the time being, the Device Farm API makes it possible to integrate with Jenkins, while plugins for other CI systems are currently under development.
Amazon will bill its Device Farm users based on “device minutes”, determined by the number of devices used and test duration. A flat fee plan will also be offered.
David Fink, marketing manager at Experitest, defined Cloud testing as “the greatest leap in expanding test coverage and reducing testing time”, since it "expands the scale of manual and automated testing" by multiplying the number of devices and OSes that can be tested by a single developer.
AWS Device Farm enters a rather crowded market where other players have been operating for a few years, such as Testdroid, Appurify, Experitest and others. While Google is known to use its own device farm to test its apps, Amazon is the big player entering the test cloud market with a public service.
