The Applicability of Automated Testing Frameworks for Mobile Application Testing: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Mobile applications are developed and released to the market every day. Due to the intense usage of mobile applications, their quality matters. End users’ rejection of mobile apps increases from time to time due to their low quality and lack of proper mobile testing. This indicates that the role of mobile application testing is crucial in the acceptance of a given software product. Test engineers use automation frameworks for testing their mobile applications. Automated testing brings several advantages to the development team. For example, automated checks are used for regression testing, fast execution of test scripts, and providing quick feedback for the development team. A systematic literature review has been used to identify and collect evidence on automated testing frameworks for mobile application testing. A total of 56 relevant research papers were identified that were published in prominent journals and conferences until February 2023. The results were summarized and tabulated to provide insights into the suitability of the existing automation testing framework for mobile application testing. We identified the major test concerns and test challenges in performing mobile automation testing. The results showed that the keyword-driven testing framework is the widely used approach, but recently, hybrid approaches have been adopted for mobile test automation. On the other hand, this review indicated that the existing frameworks need to be customized using reusable and domain-specific keywords to make them suitable for mobile application testing. Considering this, this study proposes an architecture, the mobile-based automation testing framework (MATF). In the future, to address the mobile application testing challenges, the authors will work on implementing the proposed framework (MATF).