Test Criteria for Context-Aware Mobile Applications

Abstract

Context-aware mobile apps provide adaptive services that depend on the changing environments. The challenge in testing context-aware mobile apps holds in that these apps adapt their behavior when context conditions are changing. According to an exhaustive survey of the testing context-aware mobile apps research area, current testing approaches take into consideration the apps functions and different contexts but do not consider testing coverage criteria nor evaluate the coverage of various situations. Our work is intended to fill this gap. In our previous research work, we presented a test model for context-aware mobile apps dealing with changing location context based on the combination of a Bigraph Reaction System and a Dynamic Feature Petri Net. In this paper, we propose a new test criterion for context-aware mobile apps. This criterion results from the combination of pattern-flow-based coverage criteria and boundary-based coverage criteria. With this criterion, we select the user’s location coordinates inside partition boundaries, which help narrowing the input data space and cover all test situations in test process.