Automated Tests for Mobile Games: An Experience Report

Abstract

As mobile gaming is an ever-growing, competitive and profitable market, there has been an increasing demand for better quality in video game software. While manual testing is still a common practice among mobile game developers, some repetitive and error-prone tasks could benefit from test automation. For instance, test scripts that perform sanity checks of the proper functioning of a mobile game would be desirable in an ecosystem with constant hotfixes and updates, as well as a diverse set of configurations (e.g., device hardware, screensizes, and platforms). In this context, this paper reports an experience on developing automated test scripts for mobile games. To this end, we randomly selected 16 mobile games, from different genres, among the popular ones from the Google Play Store. For each game, test scripts were developed using the Appium testing framework and the OpenCV library. Based on our results, we provide an in-depth discussion on the challenges and lessons learned.