Meeting Quality Standards for Mobile Application Development in Businesses: A Framework for Cross-Platform Testing

How do you test the same application developed for multiple mobile platforms in an effective way? Companies offering apps have to develop the same features across several platforms in order to reach the majority of potential users. However, verifying that these apps work, as intended across a set of heterogeneous devices and operating systems is not trivial. Manual testing can be performed, but this is time consuming, repetitive and error-prone. Automated tools exist through frameworks, such as Frank and Robotium, however they lack the possibility to run repeated tests across multiple heterogeneous devices. This article presents an extensible architecture and conceptual prototype that showcase and combines parallel cross-platform test execution with performance measurements. In so doing, this work contributes to a quality-assurance process by automating parts of a regression test for mobile cross-platform applications.