Bananas!

During Android Only Erik Hellman from Sony Ericsson explained how they create their Android Phones.

During his talk he mentioned that they put all phones through a monkey test. Where a phone has to sit for days with random input on the phone, without crashing.

Naturally the thought is, I wondered how the applications I’m working on would stand against such a test. A monkey test should find all places where the input validation fails, and thus crash.

So I started searching around for tools that did this for Windows Applications. However All I could find was the Hopper Windows Mobile stress test tool, and nothing for desktop Windows Applications.

The thought is if I should write my own, focusing on .Net desktop applications. A tool that sends keystroke and mouse move messages to an application generating random user input. The tool could constrain only to use certain keys or prevent certain patterns from occurring. It could restart the application when it crashes, and log all crashes to a log-file.

It could be quite easy to create a command-line interface for it and execute it in a build system. Naturally a good name for a monkey testing tool would be “Bananas!” :)

So far it’s just an idea.