Testing Context Aware Application and its Research Challenges

In the digital era, Context Aware Applications (CAA) are considered to be one of the emerging and prominent applications. These applications are self-adaptive, that can determine the situation and adapt accordingly to provide better service to the end user. Testing these applications is quiet challenging, due to its dynamic nature, as context keeps varying. To test such applications thoroughly, tester needs context information (context data) and sequence of actions performed by the end user. This makes test case development and execution difficult one. Traditional testing approach deals with static inputs and expected outputs which are fixed. However, requirements for CAA keeps changing based on the environment. Hence, test case development techniques used for traditional testing may not be sufficient for testing a CAA. This paper, gives an overview about the various CAA testing techniques that are available in literature, research challenges in testing such applications, which might help the researchers in this field.