An Industrial Survey and Assessment on Free Mobile Testing Tools

摘要

Mobile app usage continues to increase and hence more and more small and medium sized enterprises (SME) start their m-commerce. Unfortunately, the importance of mobile software testing has not been equally addressed. Our initial survey showed that mobile testing has not been included in almost all the introductory mobile courses and many SMEs heavily reply on manual testing on physical devices. Practitioners with different backgrounds are learning mobile application development and many of them may not receive any software engineering training. Thus, it will be practical for them to learn software testing tools when studying software testing theory. This paper surveys 42 companies and analyzes the industrial practice on mobile application testing. Then it categorizes and assesses twenty free/open source mobile software testing tools. Eight tools were selected and we conducted workshops on them for SME developers. At the end of the workshops, we interviewed the participants to evaluate the usefulness of the testing tools in their workplaces. We concluded that for industrial SME developers, Sikuli (Advanced GUI testing) and JMeter (server performance testing) would be more helpful than AT&T ARO (power consumption tool) and Lookback (Usability Testing tool). The work contributes to those SME companies and developers which are interested in free mobile testing tools.