Mobile GUI testing

Abstract

This paper presents a tool (iMPAcT) that automates testing of mobile applications based on the presence of recurring behaviour, UI Patterns. It combines reverse engineering, pattern matching and testing. The reverse engineering process is responsible for crawling the application, i.e. analysing the state of the application and interacting with it by firing events. The pattern matching tries to identify the presence of UI patterns based on a catalogue of patterns. When a UI Pattern from the catalogue is detected, a test strategy is applied (testing). These test strategies are called UI Test Patterns. These three phases work in an iterative way: the patterns are identified and tested between firing of events, i.e. the process alternates between exploring the application and testing the UI Patterns. The process is dynamic and fully automatic not requiring any previous knowledge about the application under test. This paper presents the results of an experiment studying the reliability of the results obtained by iMPAcT. The experiment involved 25 applications found on Google Play Store and concludes that iMPAcT is successful in identifying failures in the tested patterns and that the degree of certainty of an identified failure being an actual failure is high.