A novel approach of automation testing on mobile devices

AbstractMobile phones and mobile applications have nowbecome an integral part of our everyday life. Mobileapplication testing plays a pivotal role in making the mobileapplications more reliable and defect free. Existing testautomation tools have been tailored to perform mobile testautomation through mobile emulators. Other tools require themobile device where the application is installed, to beconnected to a computer so that the tests can be run.Obviously, the results obtained from emulators often differfrom those obtained on actual mobile devices. To our bestknowledge only a few solutions for creating automated tests ofmobile applications exist and their functionality is very limited.In this paper, we introduce the idea of implementing a mobiletest automation framework- MobTAF which performs mobiletest automation on the mobile device where connection to acomputer is not required. The framework moves the testinginfrastructure to the phone, to support test situations thatcannot easily be replicated with an emulator. A prototypeapplication was then implemented to test the mobileautomation framework, MobTAF. The results prove thatMobTAF framework is an efficient way of performing mobileapplication tests directly on the mobile devices7 Halama