Collaborative economy for testing cost reduction on Android ecosystem

Collaborative Economy (CE) promotes significant changes in several sectors around the world, e.g. the famous companies Uber, Airbnb, and Turo. The general idea behind CE is the establishment of a win-win partnership between two agents. One agent has a potential need for a resource of high cost for acquisition or location, and the other agent has the resource frequently idle. Software quality verification on Android ecosystem is a hard task due to the fragmentation among the devices, i.e. the large number of devices configurations. In this scenario, compatibility testing demands the acquisition or location of several different devices of high cost and volatility due to technology evolution. On the other hand, there are several devices around the world with a high rate of idle time and which could be used for testing, generating an extra budget for their owners. In this sense, this paper defends the principles of CE for supporting the testing activity of Android applications. We implemented a platform to use and evaluate the practical usefulness and applicability of CE principles in Android software testing context. The platform makes it possible to run system testing on several devices, geographically distributed, simultaneously. The general idea is to record system testing by using an extension of Expresso, a Google proposed framework for user interface (UI) testing, and execute the test cases on idle devices previous registered on the platform, according to the test requirements. We carried out some exploratory studies which evidentiate the potential of the proposed platform, its benefits, and its impact not only on the market but also on the way we can run efficiently testing on Android ecosystem.