Testing the Mobile Application's Performance: Case Study on Windows Mobile Devices

摘要

Mobile software usage is growing quickly, and an expanding number of consumers are expecting a consistent experience when moving from desktop PC to mobile devices and back again. One of the key factors enabling wide deployment and adoption of mobile applications is careful usage of system resources. High quality mobile applications must consume fewer system resources such as CPU, Memory, and most importantly the Battery life. It is crucial that design for mobile applications considers frugal and optimal resource usage as an essential aspect of application design (direct porting of desktop applications to mobile platforms is most often a recipe for failure). Knowing and understanding the factors that influence performance on mobile devices, is extremely beneficial in order to plan a successful testing approach. Equally challenging is the task of measuring application performance and reporting the performance data in a useful and actionable manner. In this paper, we will present a case study on performance testing of the Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile application for Windows Mobile 6.x phones. We will discuss our approach to performance testing and the challenges involved in measuring various metrics. We will also provide details on the performance metrics, tools used to gather and present this data, and how we have used this data to make important decisions throughout the product cycle. Some architectural improvements have contributed to improve the application's performance and better usage of system resources. For example, the battery life has improved by more than 300% in the 2007 R2 version of Office Communicator Mobile.