Better Android Automated Test Performance using Expresso?-Collection of common programming errors

I stumbled upon Espresso after researching automated testing frameworks for Android. It seemed to have everything that I wanted: reliable tests, minimal boilerplate code, increased performance.

I watched the GTAC 2013 presentation(s) demoing Espresso and was very excited to see how fast it ran the tests. Having actually implemented some tests, however, I must say that I don’t notice much, if any performance benefit over using the standard Android testing framework. I have not done any sort of “official” benchmarking, but it was my understanding that Espresso blew away the standard Android testing framework.

The project that I am testing is the one described in the tutorial on developer.android.com. The tests that I am writing are very simple:

@Test
public void test_sendButton_shouldInitiallyBeDisabled() {
    onView(withId(R.id.button_send)).check(matches(not(ViewMatchers.isEnabled())));
}

@Test
public void test_sendButton_shouldBeEnabledAfterEnteringText() {
    String enteredText = "This is my message!";
    // Type Text 
    onView(withId(R.id.edit_message)).perform(ViewActions.typeText(enteredText));

    // Validate the Result
    onView(withId(R.id.button_send)).check(matches(ViewMatchers.isEnabled()));
}

@Test
public void test_enteringTextAndPressingSendButton_shouldDisplayEnteredText() {
    String enteredText = "This is my message!";
    // Type Text 
    onView(withId(R.id.edit_message)).perform(ViewActions.typeText(enteredText));

    // Click Button
    onView(withId(R.id.button_send)).perform(click());

    // Validate the Results
    onView(withId(R.id.display_message)).check(ViewAssertions.matches(ViewMatchers.withText(enteredText)));
}

I followed all the instructions on the Espresso website, paying particularly close attention that my Run Configuration used the GoogleInstrumentationTestRunner.

So what am I missing? Did I just miss something simple? Or is my premise about significantly improved performance completely wrong?