Could flutter_test replace integration_test

[matanlurey]

@goderbauer @jonahwilliams @johnmccutchan and @matanlurey met today to discuss Flutter testing.

One of the topics that came up, but we don't plan to act on in the near term, is the differences between flutter_test and integration_test: both of them run in the same process (and isolate) of the running app, compared to an external test through flutter_driver, and what would it take for flutter_test to just subsume integration_test.

A non-exhaustive list might include:

• flutter_test would need to formally support running on a device¹
• Plugins and platform views would need to be enabled (versus be stubs)
• Test results would need to be reported¹
• Re-building something like an APK continuously sucks when iterating, so supporting something like hot restart

The general feel is that most of these changes are tooling related, but of course devil is in the details.

It's also worth mentioning this effort would have to come after we decide that flutter_driver should be the "external" testing story (right now both flutter_driver and integration_test attempt to be our external testing story).

Footnotes

1. It works today if you run flutter run test/path_to_test.dart but there are no test results reported ↩ ↩²

[jonahwilliams]

The fun thing is, 1 2 3 and 4 are all tooling issues that could be fixed without any changes to the test library.