How do Developers Test Android Applications?
This addresses the challenge for researchers and practitioners in mobile testing to design more effective tools by providing insights from real-world developers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing survey-based research.
The paper tackled the problem of low adoption of automated testing in Android development by surveying 102 open-source contributors to understand their testing practices and preferences, resulting in a compiled body of knowledge to guide future automated testing approaches.
Enabling fully automated testing of mobile applications has recently become an important topic of study for both researchers and practitioners. A plethora of tools and approaches have been proposed to aid mobile developers both by augmenting manual testing practices and by automating various parts of the testing process. However, current approaches for automated testing fall short in convincing developers about their benefits, leading to a majority of mobile testing being performed manually. With the goal of helping researchers and practitioners - who design approaches supporting mobile testing - to understand developer's needs, we analyzed survey responses from 102 open source contributors to Android projects about their practices when performing testing. The survey focused on questions regarding practices and preferences of developers/testers in-the-wild for (i) designing and generating test cases, (ii) automated testing practices, and (iii) perceptions of quality metrics such as code coverage for determining test quality. Analyzing the information gleaned from this survey, we compile a body of knowledge to help guide researchers and professionals toward tailoring new automated testing approaches to the need of a diverse set of open source developers.