Buck VS screenshot-tests-for-android

Hyper-large tech companies managing hyper-large monorepos using Bazel (google), buck (Facebook), please (thought machine), pants (Twitter, Foursquare & Square) enjoy them but also have a lot of resources devoted to running and maintaining it.

We use Buck company wide. Our packaging / deployment system, for example, expects to be given a Buck target to build, not a pre-built binary - I can’t just build my app with dotnet and upload it. While it is possible for a Buck target to be a simple bash command (i.e dotnet publish), doing so makes the target “opaque” - Buck wouldn’t have any knowledge of my app’s build graph so I’d lose many of the benefits it gives us (incremental cached builds etc.)

Oh excellent, then better (and more portable!) tools are available:

http://pants.build

https://ninja-build.org

https://buck.build

and, if you hate yourself: https://bazel.build

I’m feeling sorry for everyone affected.

Let’s hope that this isn’t going to impact Buck [0] too much. It’s one of the best things Facebook has ever made.

[0]: https://github.com/facebook/buck/tree/dev

Pioneered by tech giants like Google and Meta with tools like Bazel and Buck, monorepos are seeing widespread adoption across companies of all sizes and industries.

Buck has a http_file() that you can use this way, and it has first-class support for Java.

That's a good bridge into saying that we don't use pretty much any standard tooling. Our build system is Buck, we use Mercurial instead of Git, and the IDE of choice seems to be Visual Studio (although Android Studio is supported, with some custom plugins required).

Didn't know it was python based. Their github repo shows 90% of the code is java, only 2% is python. Regardless, C++ build systems should be written by people who are familiar with C++ and the specific problems they need to solve. That means the build system should be written in C++ or C and not in java, lua, or python. I certainly do not want to install python just to build my C++ programs in a CI environment, it just increases my build complexity and attack surface

The landing page of https://buck.build/ explains some of the most basic stuff. This Meta Engineering blog post summarizes some of the deeper optimizations possible through buck: https://engineering.fb.com/2017/11/09/android/rethinking-android-app-compilation-with-buck/

You might be able to use an integration test framework to generate screenshots automatically based on a series of steps that walk through the user journey.

For web: https://docs.cypress.io/guides/guides/screenshots-and-videos

For Android: https://facebook.github.io/screenshot-tests-for-android/

Android: https://github.com/facebook/screenshot-tests-for-android

Don't write assertions on views, it's way too brittle. Use Screenshot testing (it's also incredibly useful to use screenshot testing as part of TDD, write tests to generate screenshots, make changes, check screenshots). I'm the original author of https://github.com/facebook/screenshot-tests-for-android, so I'm biased. Also did a talk about this at Droidcon NYC a few years ago if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No6iZIbh59Q

If you want to do something similar in automated tests, I'd suggest https://github.com/facebook/screenshot-tests-for-android. It handles a few extra things that are useful for automation, but it's probably not that complicated to build into QuickShot.

Also take a look at screenshotbot.io, I'm the original author of screenshot-tests-for-android, which Karumi Shot uses under the hood. Screenshotbot will record your screenshots on the cloud instead of your repository. This reduces the overhead of screenshot tests on your coworkers, they don't need to understand screenshot tests in order to reap the benefits. It's how we did it at Facebook, I described this in my Droidcon talk.