Today, Wind River is launching something a bit different for them and very much unique from what I’ve seen – the Framework for Automated Software Testing for Android[]. I had a chance to sit down with Chris Buerger, Sr. Director of Mobile Solutions, for more insight.

FAST is what it says – a framework for testing. You might ask why Wind River got into this – I did too. They’ve been an Android Commercialization Partner since 2007, and have been working behind the scenes with a lot of OEMs on Android device rollouts via their professional services organizations and a couple of small acquired firms. They launched their commercial Android platform on OMAP3 at the end of last year, but in fact have a lot more unspecified engagements. The need for testing is booming, and they decided to launch FAST and address more customers.

FAST offers 3 types of testing: compatibility, functional, and stability/stress. The first is full compliance with Google’s Android Compatibility Test Suite (CTS), which has just been made public this year. Buerger points out that Google “isn’t interested in unstable devices”, and the CTS prevents folks from inadvertently or overtly breaking APIs and creating problems.

The second is a wide range of functional tests, “thousands”, covering a variety of popular SoC devices and I/O chipsets such as graphics, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G (and presumably 4G) wireless, and many other functions. I asked about specific devices, and I didn’t get a full list but popular ARM-based SoCs are probably supported, and X86 support is certainly coming if not already available. The key here is there is nothing from Google for functional testing. Buerger noted that there are “on demand” tools out there, but nothing shrink wrapped. He pointed out something else interesting when I asked about non-phone implementations of Android. There are thousands of applicable tests, but to be fully CTS compliant depends on specific feature support such as a rear-facing camera – something not likely to be found in a set-top box. That’s an interesting wrinkle in the Android puzzle.

Third, and we didn’t go into many specifics, there are stability and stress tests to execute, ensuring a device not only works but stays working under duress. This is an important part of testing that often gets overlooked – what happens when a lot is going on all at the same time, over and over. This helps find things like memory leaks and interaction errors from different functional pieces now tested together as a system.

We’ve been talking about the complexity of SoC + software design for some time, and it’s very interesting to see Wind River taking a step to add a considerable amount of value on the testing side – shrink wrapped, not just professional service or a web download – to help Android deployments take off even faster. If you’re faced with developing Android devices, this is worth a look.