Continuous, Evolutionary and Large-Scale: A New Perspective for Automated Mobile App Testing

Mobile app development involves a unique set of challenges including device fragmentation and rapidly evolving platforms, making testing a difficult task. The design space for a comprehensive mobile testing strategy includes features, inputs, potential contextual app states, and large combinations of devices and underlying platforms. Therefore, automated testing is an essential activity of the development process. However, current state of the art of automated testing tools for mobile apps poses limitations that has driven a preference for manual testing in practice. As of today, there is no comprehensive automated solution for mobile testing that overcomes fundamental issues such as automated oracles, history awareness in test cases, or automated evolution of test cases. In this perspective paper we survey the current state of the art in terms of the frameworks, tools, and services available to developers to aid in mobile testing, highlighting present shortcomings. Next, we provide commentary on current key challenges that restrict the possibility of a comprehensive, effective, and practical automated testing solution. Finally, we offer our vision of a comprehensive mobile app testing framework, complete with research agenda, that is succinctly summarized along three principles: Continuous, Evolutionary and Large-scale (CEL).Comment: 12 pages, accepted to the Proceedings of 33rd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME'17

Developing a user interface for a cross-platform web application

The purpose of this master thesis project was to investigate and analyse the main design and development approaches to creating a user interface of a cross-platform web application that is optimised for usage on both mobile and non-mobile devices. The additional goals were to analyse the main challenges in implementing such a user interface and find out whether it is feasible to achieve a consistent user experience both on mobile and desktop devices. The theoretical part of this paper analyses the main development approaches and design considerations for creating a user interface that works on mobile and non-mobile devices. For the practical part, a prototype user interface for a cross-platform book cataloguing web application has been built, tested on a number of mobile and non-mobile devices and evaluated in terms of performance and user experience. Also ideas for its further development are presented. As the result of this project, a semi-functional web application prototype has been built using Backbone.js and user interface has been created in HTML5 with CSS3. The application allows the user to organise his/her books and planned reads, leave reviews and view reviews from other readers. The application did not have all the functioning features and it still needs further work before actual usage. The biggest challenges were content planning, designing reusable UI components, finding a suitable framework for the application implementation and inconsistent CSS support across browsers. By planning the navigation and content early, testing the user interface on real devices, following the mobile first approach and progressively enhancing to a device’s capabilities, it is possible to create a consistent user experience across mobile and non-mobile devices in lightweight web applications

Moving social networking applications into the cloud

Social networking applications that are developed using traditional software and architecture have scalability issues. One way to overcome the high cost of scaling social applications is to use Cloud Computing (CC). There are various cloud computing platforms available. One very interesting CC platform is Google App Engine (GAE). This research focuses on using the “free” GAE as a way to re-implement existing social networking applications. The research focuses on how to move social applications into the cloud and on the evaluation of their performance. The thesis investigates the GAE platform, and its features. The study shows how to re-implement a social networking application using GAE cloud with limited code approximately 600 lines and evaluates the scalability of the applications