Automating testing of service-oriented mobile applications with distributed knowledge and reasoning

Automated testing of distributed, service-oriented applications, particularly mobile applications, is a hard problem due to challenges testers often must deal with, such as (1) heterogeneous platforms, (2) difficulty in introducing additional resources or backups of resources that fail during testing, and (3) lack of fine-grained control over test sequencing. To address these challenges, this paper describes an approach that combines portable operating system libraries with knowledge and reasoning, which together leverage the best features of centralized and decentralized testing infrastructures to support both heterogeneous systems and distributed control by reasoning on distributed testing events.