An Approach for Evaluating and Improving the Test Processes of Mobile Application Developments

Mobile applications have become highly pervasive in recent years. Assuring the quality of mobile applications is a highly relevant issue since application failures can lead to serious consequences, such as damage of corporate reputation or financial loss. Several obstacles exist in testing mobile applications (e.g., lack of time, absence of methods, limited budget). Our goal in this work is to investigate how we can enhance the effectiveness of testing processes applied by companies developing mobile applications. To do so, it is necessary to identify where applied industrial testing processes are actually missing in order to provide countermeasures. Our approach comprises a set of previously selected mobile testing requirements, which enable the investigation and rating of the applied testing processes based on the fulfillment of these requirements. Elicitation is done via a systematic interview of a company based on a defined questionnaire. Identified failures of selected mobile application projects are then related to the set of mobile testing requirements, and the severity of unfulfilled testing requirements is determined. Finally, we recommend to this company a set of countermeasures for unfulfilled testing requirements that may lead to crucial failures. We evaluated this approach by applying it together with eight software companies in Germany and in Brazil, followed by two surveys: one right after the interview to evaluate the acceptance of the approach, and another one after the post-processing and recommendations phase. The evaluation showed the acceptance of our approach and the expected enhancement of the effectiveness of the companies’ mobile testing processes.