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

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.