Poster: A Context Simulation Harness for Realistic Mobile App Testing

Abstract

Accurate performance testing of mobile apps require comprehensive simulation of real world context in a mobile emulator viz. location, sensor values, network conditions etc. Existing mobile emulators support such simulation, however they lack the capability for automated generation of realistic, correlated, and dependent context traces. As a result, the burden of their generation and injection is left to the developers who have to create their own traces. This is not straightforward: there are heterogenous remote databases of traces, mathematical models and trace files can be used as well, but the trace values should be correlated, and traces have to be converted to a common format. We are developing ContextMonkey - a framework that addresses these concerns by leveraging context traces from databases such as FourSquare [1], OpenSignal [2], Google Street View [3]. It acts as a harness to mobile emulators, and aims at improving the efficiency of mobile app performance tests.