A cloud based software testing paradigm for mobile applications

Abstract

The testing of applications for mobile computing devices is cumbersome due to the bounded computational resources that these devices have and diversity in mobile environments. There are many different types of emulators that have been proposed and used nowadays for this purpose. But these emulators typically cannot emulate: actual network speed and availability, actual device specific content-rendering speed, memory limitation, cache size, CPU speed, and stack size. These emulators are designed for specific platforms, which lack testing of applications on heterogeneous mobile platforms. Cloud Computing has a potential to overcome these challenges by taking up contemporary progress in parallel and distributed systems, virtualization, and software services. Cloud computing empowers us to have adaptable and on-demand network access to a common group of configurable computing resources. In this article, we introduce a cloudbased model that provides solutions to aforesaid challenges. Our model sets up a mobile environment, actual device and platform on the cloud resources for a given system configuration. It also provides software testing services to execute numerous tests automatically according to a given application.