An Innovative System for Remote and Automated Testing of Mobile Phone Applications

Application testing is an integral part of the application life cycle. This testing effort is more for the 3rd party applications in the mobile phone market, due to the wide number of handsets available on which the application needs to be tested before being released. At the same time, majority of the applications use the cellular network, necessitating the tester1 (along with the handset) to be present in the service area of the cellular network. We present a remote testing system, wherein the handset is in the cellular network service area, but the tester is present in a remote location. The tester controls the handset over the Internet. This gives opportunities to leverage the potential of the global outsourcing business model in mobile application testing domain. In addition, the system is agnostic to the Operating System & application running on the mobile phone, and is also non-intrusive. Further, we present preliminary results on automating this remote testing process itself.