Behavior Driven Platform-Independent Testing for Mobile Apps

Bachelor thesis (2017)

Authors

R.J. Vennik Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
W.F. de With Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

F. Palomba (coach)
W. Van (supervisor 1)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2017 René Vennik, Wim de With
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

2017-7

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

Software testing is widely recognised as a crucial activity for the development of modern software systems, since it points out defects and errors that were made during the development. Testing also improves the reliability and consistency of an application.

However, testing behaviour on mobile devices is not easy because of a number of reasons: (i) manual testing of behaviour requires a lot of valuable time of developers, (ii) the problem of covering all possible operating systems, (iii) covering all possible mobile devices, (iv) and frequently releasing new versions of apps is the industry standard. In addition bugs in mobile apps can cause the reputation of the app on the store to decrease and thereby the the number of downloads. Hence the following question is central to our research: can we automate user interface testing for mobile apps and multiple platforms without human interaction?

To overcome the limitation of multi-platform testing, as well as to help non-developers in the creation of tests, we introduce a novel tool that is able to test behaviour on mobile devices by defining expected scenarios. These scenarios consist of simple human readable instructions that are easy to write and understand by non-developers. These scenarios can then be tested against multiple operating systems and devices by simply connecting a device and pressing a button.