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Comment by estel | Hacker News Reader

Given that the op mentioned that he was an Android developer, it's worth noting that the Android SDK possibly has the very worst testing environment of any widely used system on the planet ever* .

* possibly an exaggeration, but it's definitely very very bad.

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So I was working on developing a multicast serial driver. Since I was developing the serial driver, I had to take... over... communication... from the copied-from-ROM driver.

And since there was only 1 working communication port, how did I debug? How did I even run a test?

The board I was developing on was amazing. It had 1 (one) LED.

Blink.

Blink (fast).

You should have just taped a photoresistor over the LED and serialized your error codes back into your dev box with morse code.

But I guess then you'd have to debug that code and you'd be back where you started.

This setup is almost exactly like the one in which I first learned C (it had a massive 2048 bytes of SRAM!).

As a bonus, it used a dodgy proprietary compiler with a whole sack of undocumented "technical limitations."

The good part is I now have a really good understanding of pointer manipulation. The bad part is using it sometimes makes me twitch.

Edit: Here's someone who's got us both beat: http://web.archive.org/web/20070613032334/http://ipodlinux.o...

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_AxcE8NTHeDU/TOW6kRd-FGI/AAAAAAAAAy...

What specifically would you like to see in terms of testing tools for Android? I ask this not because I don't think there are areas to improve (there are), but to get a better idea of where improvement is most needed.

Java has good unit testing frameworks. Try Obj-C/Cocoa.

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