Automating UI tests for mobile applications with formal gesture descriptions

Touch- and gesture-based interfaces are common in applications for mobile devices. By evolving into mass market products, smartphones and tablets created an increased need for specialized software engineering methods. To ensure high quality applications, constant and efficient testing is crucial in software development. However, testing mobile applications is still cumbersome, time-consuming and error-prone. One reason is the devices' focus on touch-based interaction - gestures cannot be easily incorporated into automated application tests. We present an extension to the popular Calabash testing framework solving this problem by allowing to describe gestures with a formal language in tests scripts.