Hybrid Crowd-powered Approach for Compatibility Testing of Mobile Devices and Applications

Abstract

Testing mobile applications (apps) to ensure they work seamlessly on all devices can be difficult and expensive, especially for small development teams or companies due to limited available resources. There is a need for methods to outsource testing on all these models and OS versions. In this paper, we propose a crowdsourced testing approach that leverages the power of the crowd to perform mobile device compatibility testing in a novel way. This approach aims to provide support for testing code, features, or hardware characteristics of mobile devices which is hardly investigated. This testing will enable developers to ensure that features and hardware characteristics of any device model or features of a specific OS version will work correctly and will not cause any problems with their apps. It empowers developers to find a solution for issues they may face during the development of an app by asking testers to perform a test or searching a knowledge base provided with the platform. It will offer the ability to add a new issue or add a solution to existing issues. We expect that these capabilities will improve the testing and development of mobile apps by considering variant mobile devices and OS versions on the crowd.