The TouchUtils class

Sometimes, when testing UIs, it is helpful to simulate different kinds of touch events. These touch events can be generated in many different ways, but probably android.test.TouchUtils is the simplest to use. This class provides reusable methods to generate touch events in test cases that are derived from InstrumentationTestCase.

The featured methods allow a simulated interaction with the UI under test. The TouchUtils class provides the infrastructure to inject the events using the correct UI or main thread, so no special handling is needed, and you don't need to annotate the test using @UIThreadTest.

TouchUtils supports the following:

The following test represents a typical usage of TouchUtils:

    public void testListScrolling() {
        listView.scrollTo(0, 0);

        TouchUtils.dragQuarterScreenUp(this, activity); 
        int actualItemPosition = listView.getFirstVisiblePosition();

        assertTrue("Wrong position", actualItemPosition > 0);
    }

This test does the following:

Even the most complex UIs can be tested in that way, and it would help you detect a variety of conditions that could potentially affect the user experience.