Mobile Software Testing: Thoughts, Strategies, Challenges, and Experimental Study

Abstract

Abstract-Mobile devices have become more pervasive in our daily lives, and are gradually replacing regular computers to perform traditional processes like Internet browsing, editing photos, playing videos and sound track, and reading different files. The importance of mobile devices in our life necessitates more concerns of the reliability and compatibility of mobile applications, and thus, testing these applications arises as an important phase in mobile devices adaption process. This paper addressed various research directions on mobile applications testing by investigating essential concepts, scope, features and requirements for testing mobile application. We highlight the similarities and the differences between mobile APP testing and mobile web testing. Furthermore, we discuss and compare different mobile testing approaches and environments, and provide the challenges as emergent needs in test environments. As a case study, we compared the testing experience of hybrid application in an emulator and a real world device. The purpose of the experiment is to verify to which extent a virtual device can emulate a complete client experience. Set of experiments are conducted where five android mobile browsers are tested. Each browser will be on a real device as well as an emulated device with the same features (CPU used, memory size, etc). The application will be tested on the following metrics: Performance and function/behavior testing.

A Scoping Review on Automated Software Testing with Special Reference to Android Based Mobile Application Testing

“…One of the major challenges of Software Testing is Device Frag-mentation [32], [4], [19], [32], [45], [1], [14], [33]. Variations in the hardware or O.S.…”

“…Variations in the hardware or O.S. components can cause mobile applications, while running on different devices, to behave differently where each application has its own unique business and data flow [1]. A study reported the existence of 1.800 hardware/O.S.…”

“…According to Cap Gemini Quality Report [1], the barriers to testing mobile application have moved from tools to methods; 56% of companies do not possess the right testing process/method, 52% do not have the devices instantly available, 48% do not have test experts, 38% do not have inhouse testing environment, 37% do not possess the right testing tools, and 33% do not receive enough time to test. However, the data shows that mobile testing rose rapidly in 2013 compared to 2012 where statistics prove that 55% of organizations implemented new methods and tools to test functionality, performance, and security of mobile applications and devices in contrast to 33% in 2012.…”

Mobile devices compatibility testing strategy via crowdsourcing

“…To answer the questions above, the following requirements have been considered: a novel compatibility testing approach on global-scale (Akour et al , 2016); the individual developers and small teams cannot have all the different types of devices, so there is a need for outsourcing to obtain enough mobile devices models with different OS versions; manual compatibility testing method on a real mobile phone to address the automated testing issue; and an online public space that documenting good Android development knowledge and experiences to understand the overall architecture of Android. …”

Hybrid Crowd-powered Approach for Compatibility Testing of Mobile Devices and Applications

“…Due to the need for a generic solution to address compatibility issues mentioned above, we consider the following requirements in our proposed solution: (1) A new testing approach is required to support a global-scale mobile device compatibility testing [12];…”