It’s October and Halloween is around the corner! I’m sure many of you have scary costumes to put together. When you’re not spending time planning your costume masterpiece, check out some of the new features available in Firebase Test Lab for Android:

Robo test improvements

Test Lab’s automated Robo test leveled up recently! Robo now crawls your app with about double the previous coverage. That means it will reach more screens and take more actions, which boosts its ability to find crashes throughout your app. In fact, the rate of finding crashes has gone up by about 62%. Robo is very motivated to find those scary bugs before they frighten your users away! If you haven’t run a Robo test against your app, just upload your APK to Test Lab in the Firebase console at no cost. You also get a Robo test with your pre-launch report in the Play Console. For the crafty among you, you could possibly make your own Robo.

Faster test results

If you run a lot of tests with the gcloud command line, and primarily want to know if your tests simply pass or fail, you can speed up your tests by opting out of some of the extra information that Test Lab collects for you. Passing the --no-record-video flag will opt out of the collection of the video of your app, and --no-performance-metrics will opt out of performance data collected for game loop tests. So use these options to give your tests a good cardio workout for sustained high speed, which is imperative for escaping zombies.

Support for Android Test Orchestrator

The Android Testing Support Library recently published some enhancements to the tooling used to test Android apps. With these updates, you can now make use of Android Test Orchestrator, which helps you isolate your Android test cases and therefore promote more consistent test results. Test Lab now supports this handy utility, so consider making use of it in your test suites today. Here’s a gratuitous link to an orchestra in costume.

If you want to chat with the Test Lab team and others in the community who love testing their apps, why don’t you join the Firebase Slack and find us in the #test-lab channel? There’s no tricks there, only treats.