A strategy to perform coverage testing of mobile applications

Abstract

The development of wireless application has recently received more attention due to the increment in the number and in the power of mobile devices such as PDA's and cellular phones. Different methods and techniques have been developed to ease the design and development of applications for these kind of devices. Also, different languages have been proposed to provide support for such platform, such as J2ME and Brew. On the other hand, few attention has been given to testing activity in this scenario. Some works try to test the functional aspects of a given application, others try to perform load, usability and stress testing. In this article we present a strategy to support coverage testing for mobile device software in such a way that the applications can be tested not only on emulators, but also on their real target mobile devices with the aid of structural coverage assessment. We also present an environment which supports the proposed strategy. Such environment is implemented in a tool, named JaBUTi/ME. A simple case illustrating how JaBUTi/ME can be used is also presented.