Automated GUI testing on the Android platform

Abstract

With increasing graphical capabilities of today’s mobile phones, an easy to use GUI has become a critical success factor for mobile software applications. As a consequence of the more advanced GUI capabilities, manual GUI testing has become more complex and error prone. Thus it is absolutely critical for efficient mobile application development to establish automated GUI testing. For Google’s open source platform Android there exist various GUI testing frameworks for mobile applications. In this paper we describe and analyze two approaches for testing mobile GUI applications: the Android Instrumentation Framework, and the Positron Framework. We will also show the strength and weaknesses of both approaches.