Cloud Platform for Research Crowdsourcing in Mobile Testing

Mobile application testing and testing over a cloud are two highly topical fields nowadays. Mobile testing presents specific test activities, including verification of an application against a variety of heterogeneous smartphone models and versions of operating systems (OS), build distribution and test team management, monitoring and user experience analytics of an application in production, etc. Cloud benefits are widely used to support all these activities. This study conducts in-depth analyses of existing cloud services for mobile testing and addresses their weaknesses regarding research purposes and testing needs of the critical and business-critical mobile applications.   During this study, a Cloud Testing of Mobile Systems (CTOMS) framework for effective research crowdsourcing in mobile testing was developed. The framework is presented as a lightweight and easily scalable distributed system that provides a cloud service to run tests on a variety of remote mobile devices. CTOMS provides implementation of two novel functionalities that are demanded by advanced investigations in mobile testing. First, it allows full multidirectional testing, which provides the opportunities to test an application on different devices and/or OS versions, and new device models or OS versions for their compatibility with the most popular applications in the market, or just legacy critical apps, etc. Second, CTOMS demonstrates the effective integration of the appropriate testing techniques for mobile development within such a service. In particular, it provides a user with suggestions about coverage of configurations to test on using combinatorial approaches like a base choice, pair-wise, and t-way. The current CTOMS version supports automated functional testing of Android applications and detection of defects in the user interface (UI). This has a great value because requirements for UI and user experience are high for any modern mobile application.    The fundamental analysis of possible test types and techniques using a system like CTOMS was conducted, and ways of possible enhancements and extensions of functionality for possible research are listed. The first case studies prove the work of implemented novel concepts, their usefulness, and their convenience for experiments in mobile testing. The overall work proves that a study of cloud mobile testing is feasible even with small research resources.  M.S

Building Stronger Bridges: Strategies for Improving Communication and Collaboration Between Industry and Academia in Software Engineering

Background: The software engineering community has expressed growing concern regarding the need for more connections between research and practice. Despite the large amount of knowledge researchers generate, its impact on real-world practice is uncertain. Meanwhile, practitioners in industry often struggle to access and utilize relevant research outcomes that could inform and enhance their work. Collaboration between industry and academia is seen as a potential solution to bridge this gap, ensuring that research remains relevant and applicable in real-world contexts.Objective: This research aims to explore challenges in communication and collaboration between industry and to design, evaluate, and implement strategies that foster this collaboration. Methodology: The design science paradigm inspires this research, as we aim to obtain knowledge about industry-academia communication and collaboration by studying challenges and solutions in context. The thesis includes case studies; some are exploratory, while others focus on evaluating specific strategies.Results: In terms of problem understanding, we identified challenges that impact communication and collaboration, such as different expectations, perspectives, and ways of working. Furthermore, we pinpointed factors facilitating communication, including long-term projects, research relevance, and practitioners' involvement.Regarding how to improve communication and collaboration, we investigated two strategies. The first strategy involves using the SERP-taxonomy approach in a project on software vulnerability management in IoT systems. The second strategy involves the proposal of interactive rapid reviews, conducted in close collaboration with practitioners. We share the lessons from conducting two reviews (one in testing machine learning systems and the other in software component selection). The benefits of conducting interactive rapid reviews include mutual understanding, the development of networks, and increased motivation for further studies.Conclusion: The thesis emphasizes the importance of industry-academia collaboration as a key aspect in closing gaps between research and practice. The strategies discussed provide tools to understand industry-academia partnerships better and support future collaborations