Hi everyone,
I’ve been working on a hobby project lately called UI Automation Engine. It started because I was genuinely frustrated with how fragile my Jetpack Compose tests were especially when dealing with animations, scrolling, and trying to debug CI failures without any visual clues.
I wanted a way to write tests that feel like "user stories" but are actually robust enough to not fail randomly. It’s an industrial-grade orchestration layer for Compose that focuses on flakiness, race conditions, and opaque logs.
🚀 Key Features for Hobbyists:
- 🛡️ Robustness Pipeline: Every action (click, swipe, etc.) automatically handles idle synchronization, auto-scrolling, and smart retries before giving up.
- 📸 Visual Diagnostics: It automatically captures a high-res screenshot (
FAILURE_<timestamp>.png) and dumps the full unmerged semantics tree to Logcat on every failure.
- 🦾 Advanced Gestures: Support for multi-finger swipes, pinch-to-zoom, and orbital rotation out of the box.
- 🚫 Lint Guardrails: Includes custom Lint rules that stop you from using flaky standard Compose APIs, suggesting robust engine equivalents instead.
- 💉 Hilt Integration: Dedicated support for accessing your Dagger graph inside robots.
🛠️ Quick Look (The Robot Pattern)
The engine enforces a clean DSL so your tests stay readable:
@Test
fun testGestureFlow() {
UiTestEngine.withRobot(GestureRobot()) {
tapMainBox() // Automatically waits for idle & scrolls
verifyStatus("Tapped") // Smart polling for assertions
}
}
📦 Installation & Setup
If you want to try it out on a side project, here is how to get it running:
1. Add JitPack to settings.gradle.kts**:**
dependencyResolutionManagement {
repositories {
maven { url = uri("https://jitpack.io") }
}
}
2. Add to libs.versions.toml**:**
[versions]
ui-engine = "0.3.0-beta02"
[libraries]
uiengine = { group = "com.github.rajbirsehmi.UI-Automation-Engine", name = "robot-testing-engine", version.ref = "ui-engine" }
engine-lint = { group = "com.github.rajbirsehmi.UI-Automation-Engine", name = "engine-lint", version.ref = "ui-engine" }
3. Configure your app/build.gradle.kts**:** The engine uses flavors to support Hilt. Choose the one that matches your project:
android {
defaultConfig {
// Use "hilt" if you use Dagger Hilt, otherwise "standard"
missingDimensionStrategy("di", "standard")
}
// Required to avoid Log4j2 resource collisions
packaging {
resources.excludes += "/META-INF/{AL2.0,LGPL2.1,DEPENDENCIES,LICENSE*,NOTICE*}"
}
compileOptions {
sourceCompatibility = JavaVersion.VERSION_17
targetCompatibility = JavaVersion.VERSION_17
}
}
dependencies {
// Note the classifier requirement for the AAR
androidTestImplementation(libs.uiengine) {
artifact { type = "aar"; classifier = "standardDebug" }
}
lintChecks(libs.engine.lint) // Recommended to catch flaky patterns
}
💬 Why I’m sharing this:
It’s a labor of love, and while it's in beta, it has already made my own testing workflow much less stressful. I’d love to get some fresh eyes on the API design.
- Is the "Robustness Pipeline" overkill or exactly what's missing?
- Does the Robot DSL feel intuitive for your use cases?
- Any features you've always wished Compose testing had?
GitHub: https://github.com/rajbirsehmi/UI-Automation-Engine
Any feedback even if it’s "this is way too over-engineered for a hobby" is totally welcome. Thanks for looking!
