Test model and coverage analysis for location-based mobile services

Abstract

Location-based services (LBS) are very important mobile app services, which provide diverse mobility services for mobile users anywhere and anytime. This brings new demands, issues, and challenges in mobile application testing. Today, mobile applications provide location-based service functions based on dynamic location contexts, mobile users and their travel patterns to deliver location-based mobile data, and service actions. Current software testing methods do not consider location-based validation coverage. Hence, there is a lack of research results addressing location-based mobile application testing. This paper focuses on mobile LBS testing. A novel test object model is proposed for quality validation of location-based mobile information services. In addition, the related test coverage metrics are also presented. These metrics can be useful for test engineers in designing test cases. A case study based on student testers is reported to demonstrate the potential application of the proposed model.