Performance Testing of Mobile Applications at the Unit Test Level

TLDR

Rapid growth in wireless markets and mobile devices has driven the need for high‑quality apps, yet short development cycles and update challenges make rigorous testing essential, especially as performance testing has traditionally focused on load, usability, and stress while remaining limited by development environment constraints. This study proposes a unit‑level performance testing method that constructs a benchmark database within an emulator‑based test environment. The authors present a tool that implements this method and validate its reliability through experimental evaluation. Experimental results confirm the reliability of the performance test outcomes generated by the tool.

Abstract

With the rapid growth of the wireless market and the development of various mobile devices, innovative methods and technologies to produce high-quality mobile applications and reduce time to market have been emerging. Mobile applications are often characterized by an array of limitations such as the short development lifecycle to gain a competitive advantage and difficulties to update once released. Hence, rigorous testing on the applications is required before distribution to the market, including structural white-box, functional black-box, integration and system testing. Although recently performance testing at the system test level has become crucial given its direct connection with the product quality improvement, most such tests are confined to the areas of load, usability, and stress testing. Moreover, the implementation itself is insufficient due to the limitations of the development environment. This paper proposes a method to support performance testing utilizing a database established through benchmark testing in emulator-based test environment at the unit test level. It also presents the tool that supports the proposed method of performance testing and verifies the reliability of performance test results through experiments.