Problems and solutions in mobile application testing

Abstract

In recent years the amount of literature published about mobile application testing has significantly grown. However, it is unclear to what degree stated problems and proposed solutions are relevant to industry. To shed light on this issue, we conducted a literature survey to provide an overview of what current scientific literature considers problems and potential solutions in mobile application testing, and how often proposed solutions were reportedly evaluated in industry. Then we conducted a case study involving six software companies in Estonia to find out which of the problems are considered relevant by professionals, and which of the proposed solutions are considered novel and applicable. In total, we identified 49 potential problems or challenges in the mobile application testing domain and 39 potential solutions, some of which were implemented software tools while others were just theoretical concepts. Although some of the solutions were reportedly applied in practice, in most cases the literature did not give much information on the actual usage in industry of the proposed solutions. The case study revealed that while the relevance of each identified problem was highly variable from one company to another, there are some key problems that are generally considered vital both by research and industry. Regarding solution proposals, it turned out they are often described too much on the conceptual level or are too unrelated to the most urgent test-related problems of our case companies to be of interest to them.