Glaring Importance

If you're an Android developer, check out Test Butler, a new open source Android testing utility from my team at LinkedIn. Simply installing this on your Android emulator and adding one line of code will automatically make your tests more stable and reliable. For more details, head over to the announcement post on the LinkedIn Engineering blog or visit the GitHub repository.

I've been running Android UI tests at my company using the API 22 revision 1 emulator (Android 5.1). Things have overall been pretty stable, but since most devices have received an update to at least Android 5.1.1 (the revision 4 emulator of API 22), I wanted to update the emulator we were using to run our tests as well.

When running Espresso UI tests, we found that disabling the software keyboard during tests made them significantly more stable. We did this by setting the following line in our AVD's config.ini file:

hw.keyboard=yes

Configuring our emulator have a hardware keyboard was enough to tell Android not to show the software keyboard while typing in input fields. However, in Android 5.1.1, this behavior changed. A new setting was added in Android 5.1.1 to the "Language & Input" section of the Android OS Settings app:


adb shell settings put secure show_ime_with_hard_keyboard 0

Once we found this command, we modified our emulator startup script to call it after launching the emulator and we were back to our stable behavior - no software keyboard. If you're having similar problems, try out this solution for running tests on Android 5.1.1 and above.

The Android API provides a useful way for developers to collect and view system debug output. The tool, Logcat, contains stack traces from application crashes, as well as custom messages that developers can provide in their code. Every log message has an associated "tag" field, which is the main focus of this post.

Conventionally, developers will define a constant string field called TAG near the top of their code files. There are a variety of ways to define this field, but the main choices are usually:

1. private static final String TAG = Foo.class.getName(); // "com.example.android.Foo"
2. private static final String TAG = Foo.class.getCanonicalName(); // "com.example.android.Foo"
3. private static final String TAG = Foo.class.getSimpleName(); // "Foo"
4. private static final String TAG = "Foo"; // "Foo"

I'll state up front, I prefer option #4, for several reasons:

1. #1-#3 all require the class to do some static initialization work. Yes, it's not MUCH work, but it's more work than nothing.
2. #4 allows the compiler to more aggressively optimize, for example, by inlining the TAG string across all log statements at compile time.
3. Log tags have a max length of 23 characters, and longer tags will be truncated.
1. This means that #1 & #2 have an extremely high chance of truncation right off the bat. Having a tag of "com.example.android.in" instead of "Foo isn't very useful.
2. Even with #3, if the class name is long you could still end up with a truncated log tag. With #4, you can customize your tag to ensure it's under 23 characters even if your class name is longer.
3. As of Build Tools 21.0.3, there is a lint check for this, but the lint check can only detect tags created with string literals, as in option #4.
4. If you're using Proguard to obfuscate your app, then class name Foo gets obfuscated and your tag becomes something like "a" instead of "Foo" if you're using #1-#3.
5. #4 is what Google uses inside the AOSP codebase (though I'm not aware of any justification for Google on why they do this)

The main downside of option #4 is that the tag won't automatically be updated if you refactor the class name. However, since TAG is generally the first line in a class, it's likely that the discrepancy will be noticed either by the person doing the refactoring or someone who reviews the code change.

Another useful tip for using option #4 is to update your new class template in Android Studio to automatically create your tag for you. Just go to Preferences -> Editor -> File and Code Templates -> Class and change the template to the following:


This will automatically create a TAG field with the same name as your class file, and then you can customize it if needed.

Happy logging!

After recently wrapping up the initial release of the new LinkedIn app for Android & iOS, I took a long-awaited break over the holidays to unwind and refresh. I started taking a look at all the stuff I'd been putting off for the last few months...and realized I needed a better way to stay on top of all this.

I had over 50 constantly open Chrome tabs with things I needed to eventually follow up on. I've tried using bookmarks in the past, but I've found that if it's not in my face somehow, I'll just forget about it. I also had a collection of random files in my Mac's Downloads folder, because I needed to do something with them someday and needed to have them available for that eventuality. I also had about 80 emails waiting in my Gmail inbox for some kind of follow up or future project that would require replying to the thread. There was an assortment of notes in Google Keep mentioning ideas I'd had and wanted to look into once things slowed down. And of course, there was always the mental list of stuff I needed or wanted to do that never made it into any of these "systems"...I'd just remember them periodically and wince that I hadn't done them yet before forgetting them for a few more weeks.

This was not good in a number of ways...it was stress-inducing, for one. It also made it hard to pick something to work on when I actually found myself with some free time...where should I look for a new task? And perhaps the most annoying problem....all those open Chrome tabs slowed down my computer!

So yesterday I downloaded the 14 day trial of OmniFocus. I've heard nothing but praise about this Mac app from The Omni Group so I thought I'd see if it could help me get organized. I won't go into a lot of detail here, because I'm sure others have covered the program much more thoroughly, but so far I'm hopeful that this will help keep things organized. I spent an hour or two doing a brain dump into OmniFocus's "Inbox", converting all my mental todos into "actions", and then slowly converting my open Chrome tabs and emails into actions that had a link back to the referencing web page or email thread.

So far my biggest win is being able to close all the tabs I perpetually had open because I needed to check them for something once per day. I replaced them with a set of repeating tasks to check the pages every morning when I come into work. We'll see how this system works once I get back into the swing of things this month, but for now I'm happy with just my email, calendar, and scrum board tabs open in Chrome.

If I continue to like OmniFocus as much as it seems like I will, I'll definitely be paying the relatively cheap $39.99 price tag for their Mac app. I'd encourage you to check it out if you're looking for a good way to organize your todo list and other tasks.

Yesterday was the last day of the Android Dev Summit conference by Google. The conference was packed with deep-dive tech talks on some of the most relevant topics to Android devs today, including Gradle build optimizations, performance testing tools, and data binding tips. I left the conference with a long list of things I can change to improve the performance of my build and tests, and be ready for new tooling features from Google like Instant Run.

The full list of improvements will take a while to implement, but there were three simple fixes I was able to make in a day that had a dramatic impact on the performance of my builds.

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Before asking, be able to answer a few questions…

• What have you tried so far? Make sure you do some initial investigation on your own before asking for help. You may find that five extra minutes of searching will get you the answer just as fast as asking someone else. When you do need to ask for help, make sure to share what you’ve already tried, so your co-worker doesn’t repeat the same steps.
• What information do you have about the problem? Keep track of anything you think might be relevant so you can share it with the person you ask for help. Did the problem start happening right after upgrading a related piece of software? That’s probably worth sharing.
• What are the next things you think you should try? It should be pretty rare that you get to the point where you’re truly out of ideas for how to investigate your problem. If your next step is “google the error message,” then you probably haven’t spent enough time investigating on your own. On the other hand, if your next step is “debug the source code of the OS kernel,” you’ve probably waited a bit too long to ask for advice. The trick is to make sure you’ve done your due diligence, but haven’t wasted too much time on a problem that your co-worker might be able to solve in five minutes.

Still stuck? Time to bring in the cavalry…

• Start with a wide audience and narrow if necessary. Does your team have a group chat room? That’s a good first place to ask, since many people will see your question and be able to either provide an answer or point you in the right direction.
• Don’t interrupt, if possible. If you need to target your question at a specific person, start with an instant message. This lets them respond to you when it’s convenient for them. Dropping by their desk unannounced may break their concentration or take them away from another important task.
• Start with a short summary of the problem. There’s always a chance your co-worker has seen this before, so give them enough information to recognize the problem, but there’s no need to give a multi-page summary right off the bat.

Once you've asked...

• Be respectful of the person's time. If you're asking about something that might take a while, like building the codebase or running tests, rather than standing at their desk while you wait to see if the fix works, you can collect a series of things to try. Write them down so you don't forget, and then go back and try them on your own. Feel free to send a message to the person who helped you to let them when and how things got resolved.
• Pay attention to how the person helping you investigates the problem. What do they do that you didn’t? Sometimes they will just “know” the answer; if this is the case, ask them how you could have figured out the solution on your own. Could documentation be improved for the process? Volunteer to record your findings so others can benefit from your solution.
• For coding-related questions, make sure your IDE/keyboard/etc are using standard shortcuts and settings. If the person helping you needs to use your computer, be ready to turn off vim mode and your Dvorak keyboard settings to make it easy for her to navigate and type.
• Pay back the favor! If someone else runs into the same problem in the future, help him or her find the answer and share your findings. This is the best way to scale knowledge and improve the skills of your entire company.