MTCONTEXT: apoio à geração de casos de teste para aplicações móveis sensíveis ao contexto

Abstract

Mobile computing is currently everywhere. Applications running on mobile devices (e.g. smartphones and tablets) are becoming increasingly popular and they represent a revolution in the information technology sector. The exponential growth of this market and the criticality of the developed systems impose greater attention to reliability aspects of these applications. Mobile applications are not free of defects, and new software engineering approaches are needed to test them. In addition to the considerable increase in the use of mobile devices in recent years, allowing users to perform more tasks in a mobile environment, technological advances in mobile devices and communication networks, has made it possible the context awareness, characteristic of ubiquitous computing. One of the ways to evaluate the quality of these applications is through testing. This paper proposes the definition of a testing technique to support the generation of test cases for Context Aware mobile applications in order to decrease the amount of test cases generated for this type of application, decrease the generation time of these test cases increase the contexts coverage achieved with these test cases and facilitate the management of the tests generated by a tool support. The results obtained in controlled experiment conducted with two scenarios of context aware mobile applications provided evidence regarding the feasibility of this work. MTContext approach contributed to the generation of test cases with significant statistical difference when compared to Ad Hoc approach concerned with the higher contexts coverage during test cases generation. However, the results of this experiment showed limitations and possible upgrades to MTContext approach that will be addressed in future work.