Towards unit testing of user interface code for android mobile applications

Abstract

As the availability and popularity of mobile applications grows, there is also an increased interest for them to be solid and well tested. Consequently, there is also an interest in assessing the correctness of their system rapidly, since smart phone applications usually develop quickly and have a lower lifecycle as compared to desktop applications. We are specifically interested in an efficient way of testing the Graphical User Interface (GUI), as it is both central to the user experience and harder to evaluate than standard business logic. This research paper is a study on the different ways to assess the validity of the GUI code for an Android mobile application with special focus on unit testing. It describes the available testing techniques and details the difficulty in writing unit tests for GUI code. Finally, the study gives a recommendation based on the different testing approaches available, followed by a discussion of both the implications and limitations of the findings. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.