A novel approach of automation testing on mobile devices

Mobile phones and mobile applications have now become an integral part of our everyday life. Mobile application testing plays a pivotal role in making the mobile applications more reliable and defect free. Existing test automation tools have been tailored to perform mobile test automation through mobile emulators. Other tools require the mobile device where the application is installed, to be connected to a computer so that the tests can be run. Obviously, the results obtained from emulators often differ from those obtained on actual mobile devices. To our best knowledge only a few solutions for creating automated tests of mobile applications exist and their functionality is very limited. In this paper, we introduce the idea of implementing a mobile test automation framework MobTAF which performs mobile test automation on the mobile device where connection to a computer is not required. The framework moves the testing infrastructure to the phone, to support test situations that cannot easily be replicated with an emulator. A prototype application was then implemented to test the mobile automation framework, MobTAF. The results prove that MobTAF framework is an efficient way of performing mobile application tests directly on the mobile devices.