Overview

The Monkey is a command-line tool that that you can run on any emulator instance or on a device. It sends a pseudo-random stream of user events into the system, which acts as a stress test on the application software you are developing.

The Monkey includes a number of options, but they break down into four primary categories:

• Basic configuration options, such as setting the number of events to attempt.
• Operational constraints, such as restricting the test to a single package.
• Event types and frequencies.
• Debugging options.

When the Monkey runs, it generates events and sends them to the system. It also watches the system under test and looks for three conditions, which it treats specially:

• If you have constrained the Monkey to run in one or more specific packages, it watches for attempts to navigate to any other packages, and blocks them.
• If your application crashes or receives any sort of unhandled exception, the Monkey will stop and report the error.
• If your application generates an application not responding error, the Monkey will stop and report the error.

Depending on the verbosity level you have selected, you will also see reports on the progress of the Monkey and the events being generated.