What are Software Engineers asking about Android Testing on Stack Overflow?

Abstract

Software testing represents an important activity to achieve quality during mobile application development. The constant evolution of mobile applications in previous years relating to size and complexity entails the need to improve testing techniques and tools. In this context, developers/testers often resort to specialized communities or Question & Answer repositories to clarity doubts regarding testing in a practical and efficient way. Thus, these repositories become a popular source of data to understand the current context of software testing practices. In this paper, we present a study using the Stack Overflow repository for analyzing and clustering the main topics on Android testing. We employed the LDA algorithm to summarize the mobile testing related questions. Our findings show that topics such as testing tools, functional testing, and unit testing are often discussed when compared to other topics. We also analyzed the evolution of the interest of Android testing tools. Results show that developers are more interested in Appium, Espresso, Monkey, and Robotium tools.