Experience Report on Developing a Crowdsourcing Test Platform for Mobile Applications

Abstract

Crowdsourcing-based testing is a recent approach where testing is operated by volunteer users through the cloud. This approach is particularly suited for mobile applications since various users operating in various contexts can be involved. In the field of software engineering, crowd-testing has acquired a reputation for supporting the testing tasks, not only by professional testers, but also by end users. In this paper, we present TMACSTest (Testing of Mobile Applications using Crowdsourcing). This platform provides the important features for crowdsourcing testing of mobile apps by means of the following functionalities: It allows mobile app providers to register and upload mobile apps for testing, and it allows volunteering Internet users to register and test uploaded mobile apps. Expected behavior is that uploaded mobile apps are tested by many different Internet users in order to cover different runtime platforms and meaningful geographical locations.