Confused about testCompile and androidTestCompile in Android Gradle

Question

I\'m new to testing world and even more to Android testing world. While doing research on Robolectric that aids with tests on android one thing confuses me the most. Sometim

Answer 1

//unit testing

testCompile 'junit:junit:4.12'

The above code is a dependency of JUnit 4 in build.gradle file in android studio. You see that it has testCompile, beacuse JUnit runs on JVM and does not require a device or emulator to run. That also means that JUnit tests will not require the application context to run and if they require we would need to "MOCK" them.

//Insturmented Unit Testing

androidTestCompile('com.android.support.test:runner:0.5', {
        exclude group: 'com.android.support', module: 'support-annotations'
    })

Now we see androidTestCompile here, because this time we intend to use the device or emulator for tests, that is Instrumentation testing. For beter clarification I would suggest to read from developer.android.com