Android Manifest Instrumentation

Question

I have a android test project setup to test my android project. In the android test project's manifest, I have an entry for instrumentation. It looks like:

<instrumentation
    android:name="android.test.InstrumentationTestRunner"
    android:targetPackage="com.company.android" />

I'm curious what the point of this entry is, and particuarly what the purpose of android:targetPackage="com.company.android" is for. I ask, because I refactored the old project and put classes into different packages, so I'm curious on what I need to update this value to... is it suppose to point the the package where the class that extends android.app.Application is at?

Answer 1

It tells the build system where to access the actual project you are going to test.

This is necessary because you need access to all your Activities and classes without having extra copies around.

Info about it is scattered around in: http://developer.android.com/tools/testing/testing_android.html

Answer 2

InstrumentationTestRunner is something you use to write Android unit tests.

From the documentation:

Typical Usage

Write TestCases that perform unit, functional, or performance tests against the classes in your package. 
Typically these are subclassed from:

ActivityInstrumentationTestCase2
ActivityUnitTestCase
AndroidTestCase
ApplicationTestCase
InstrumentationTestCase
ProviderTestCase
ServiceTestCase
SingleLaunchActivityTestCase

In an appropriate AndroidManifest.xml, define the this instrumentation with the appropriate android:targetPackage set.
Run the instrumentation using "adb shell am instrument -w", with no optional arguments, to run all tests (except performance tests).
Run the instrumentation using "adb shell am instrument -w", with the argument '-e func true' to run all functional tests. These are tests that derive from InstrumentationTestCase.
Run the instrumentation using "adb shell am instrument -w", with the argument '-e unit true' to run all unit tests. These are tests that do notderive from InstrumentationTestCase (and are not performance tests).
Run the instrumentation using "adb shell am instrument -w", with the argument '-e class' set to run an individual TestCase.