Mobile Application Testing on Clouds: Challenges, Opportunities and Architectural Elements

With mobility increasing more each year, mobile devices and operating system (OS) fragmentation are increasing at an even faster pace. A multitude of screen sizes, network connection types, and OS versions have emerged in the market and led mobile developers to rethink testing practices to ensure quality and a good experience for increasingly demanding users who crave highly reliable and stable applications. Such best practices come at the high cost for testing infrastructure and maintenance, making most development teams bypass test cycles and deliver applications before they are thoroughly validated. And when teams pursue automated test cycles on clouds, expenses due to high-cost services are not always worth the investment in application development phases. As a result, test cycles which are essential to validate application reliability and stability, such as regression, functional, and leakage tests are left out, primarily affecting user experience. This paper shows the challenges intrinsic to mobile application testing in consonance with the opportunities provided by clouds. We explored the state of the art to synthesize current cloud-based mobile application testing architectures to convey the need for a new concept and platform to minimize maintenance and make testing infrastructures more cost-effective. Hence, we proposed an alternative architecture using emulated devices for testing automation, which aims for massive test cycles at a lower cost.