Automated integration tests for mobile applications in Java 2 micro edition

Abstract

Applications written for mobile devices have become more and more complex, adjusting to the constantly improving computational power of hardware. With the growing application size comes the need for automated testing frameworks, particularly frameworks for automated testing of user interaction and graphical user interface. While such testing (also called capture-replay) has been thoroughly discussed in literature with respect to desktop applications, mobile development limits the possibilities significantly. To our best knowledge only a few solutions for creating automated tests of mobile applications exist and their functionality is very limited in general or constrained to only proprietary devices. In this paper we demonstrate preliminary results of our attempt to design and implement a framework for capturing and replaying user interaction in applications written for the Java 2 Micro Edition environment. Our evaluation test bed is a complex commercial mobile navigation system and the outcomes so far are very promising. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.