How to continue an Android instrumentation test run after exception?

Question

Apparently an instrumentation test run is stopped when on exception occurs in the instrumented application:

Test failed to run to completion. Reason: 'Instrumentation run failed due to 'Exception''. Check device logcat for details

Is this the desired behavior or a misconfiguration in a custom instrumentation runner?

I'm using a custom MonitorinInstrumentation [1] in order to automate acceptance tests.

Unfortunately test execution is canceled when on exception occurs in one test. I want the test suite to complete and only mark the failed tests, like in JUnit.

Is there a general approach to execute (connected) tests without quitting the whole instrumentation in case an exception occurs in one test?

1. https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-jvm/blob/master/examples/android/android-studio/Cukeulator/app/src/androidTest/java/cucumber/cukeulator/test/Instrumentation.java

Answer 1

Instrumentation tests raise an Exception when something goes wrong (e.g. some conditions that you want to check). You can usually avoid some test to fail using try catch statement(or changing those checks). In this case there's something that made Dalvik Virtual Machine stop. This is usually caused by a crash in your app. Try to check carefully your tests flow to analyze if there are some crashes. Also, be sure to not use System.exit(0) in onDestroy() in some of your activities because this can cause your problem. I hope to can help you.