Android why test with espresso

Question

I came across this testing framework Espresso.

On some job applications I see that they look for experience in espresso.

This got me wondering what it is.

I see espresso is a testing framework. I see how it works and it's fairly easy to learn. But now is my question, why would I want to test it with espresso instead of a physical test ?

Because I have seen a couple of videos of espresso and how it works, it got me wondering why I would use espresso instead of my own mobile device with my own hands.

I did a lot of test just by hand, and I don't really see the difference between testing it by hand and testing it with espresso. While physical testing requires no extra programming work, espresso does. And in the mean time I wrote an espresso script, I already could've tested it by hand.

I can see the outcome of my physical tests just by looking at the result while espresso tells me if it's working fine or not. Why would people use espresso ?

Kind regards,

Alex

Answer 1

You use Espresso because it saves you time and because human testing is error prone.

Think of a bigger app where you have to test the whole flow every time you do a small change that could break the app. You use espresso to build your tests and check if the app still works as expected after every push/commit.

Example: think of a chat app in which you send different types of messages (audio, video, photo, text, location, gif). Why send each type of message by hand and not automate it and make it faster?