Automated verification of compliance of non-functional requirements on mobile applications through metamorphic testing

Abstract

The growing use of mobile applications in almost every aspect of modern life, from banking to office systems, is making it is quality increasingly necessary. Thus, software testing activities have been increasingly in demand in this domain. However, mobile application testing imposes several new challenges and several peculiarities, such as limited power, interface adaptation, and privacy of user data. Most of these peculiarities are related to Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) and conventional software testing approaches are ineffective. Based on this, the Metamorphic Testing (MT) is an approach that has been applied in many domains as a strategy for generating new test cases and an alternative to alleviate the oracle problem. Through the generation of Metamorphic Relations (MRs), generated from characteristics of the System Under Testing (SUT), it is possible to evaluate the presence of flaws. Recently, studies have been conducted to evaluate the applicability of MT to reveal performance flaws. The goal of this Ph.D. project proposal is to propose an approach to automate the verification of compliance of NFRs on mobile applications through MT. Also, we intend to develop a tool for applying the approach, and a set of criteria to improve the process of verifying NFRs through MT. Finally, we expect to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach on real mobile applications.