What are list of tasks that ConnectedAndroidTest executes?

Question

I want to understand more about ConnectedAndroidTest Gradle task. I see that it is used to install the application and test apks and run the tests.

But what are the individual steps that it does? (gradle tasks if any)

"gradle build" seems to generate the Application apk. What task generates the test apk? And how does it(ConnectedAndroidTest) install the application and test apk? And how does it start the tests?

Thanks very much.

Answer 1

To answer the more general question "what are the list of tasks that task <taskName> executes?", there are two simple ways to find that out for any given task.

The first is:

./gradlew tasks --all | grep <taskName> 

where <taskName> should be replaced with whatever task you care about. E.g., ./gradlew tasks --all | grep connectedDebugAndroidTest. Note that I'm piping through grep to save myself the trouble of manually sifting through the list of all tasks.

The second is:

Use the task-tree plugin. Once applied, usage looks like this:

./gradlew <taskName> taskTree

Or, as I usually prefer it:

./gradlew <taskName> taskTree --no-repeat -quiet

The latter option makes the output a bit less cluttered.