Cross-platform testing and maintenance of web and mobile applications

Roy Choudhary, Shauvik

Title:

Cross-platform testing and maintenance of web and mobile applications

dc.contributor.advisor	Orso, Alessandro
dc.contributor.author	Roy Choudhary, Shauvik
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Naik, Mayur
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Clark, Russell J.
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Prvulovic, Milos
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Prasad, Mukul
dc.contributor.department	Computer Science
dc.date.accessioned	2015-06-08T18:36:28Z
dc.date.available	2015-06-08T18:36:28Z
dc.date.created	2015-05
dc.date.issued	2015-04-13
dc.date.submitted	May 2015
dc.date.updated	2015-06-08T18:36:28Z
dc.description.abstract	Modern software applications need to run on a variety of web and mobile platforms with diverse software and hardware-level features. Thus, developers of such software need to duplicate the testing and maintenance effort on a wide range of platforms. Often developers are not able to cope with this increasing demand and release software that is broken on certain platforms, thereby affecting a class of customers using such platforms. Hence, there is a need for automating such duplicate activities to assist the developer in coping with the ever increasing demand. The goal of my work is to improve the testing and maintenance of cross-platform web and mobile applications by developing automated techniques for comparing and matching the behavior of such applications across different platforms. To achieve this goal, I have identified three problems that are relevant in the context of cross-platform testing and maintenance: 1) automated identification of inconsistencies in the same application's behavior across multiple platforms, 2) detecting features that are present in the application on one platform, but missing on another platform version of the same application, and, 3) automated migration of test suites and possibly other software artifacts across platforms. I present three different scenarios for the development of {cross-platform} web and mobile applications, and formulate each of the three problems in the scenario where it is most relevant. To address and mitigate these problems in their corresponding scenarios, I present the principled design, development and evaluation of the two techniques, and a third preliminary technique to highlight the research challenges of test migration. The first technique, X-pert identifies inconsistencies in a web application running on multiple web browsers. The second technique, FMAP matches features between the desktop and mobile versions of a web application and reports any features found missing on either of the platform versions. The final technique, MigraTest attempts to automatically migrate test cases from a mobile application on one platform to its counterpart on another platform. To evaluate these techniques, I implemented them as prototype tools and ran these tools on real-world subject applications. The empirical evaluation of X-pert shows that it is accurate and effective in detecting real-world inconsistencies in web applications. In the case of FMAP, the results of my evaluation show that it was able to correctly identify missing features between desktop and mobile versions of the web applications considered, as confirmed by my analysis of user reports and software fixes for these applications. The third technique, MigraTest was able to efficiently migrate test cases between two mobile platform versions of the subject applications.
dc.description.degree	Ph.D.
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/1853/53588
dc.language.iso	en_US
dc.publisher	Georgia Institute of Technology
dc.subject	Cross-platform testing
dc.subject	Mobile testing
dc.subject	Test migration
dc.subject	Web application testing
dc.subject	Cross-browser testing
dc.title	Cross-platform testing and maintenance of web and mobile applications
dc.type	Text
dc.type.genre	Dissertation
dspace.entity.type	Publication
local.contributor.advisor	Orso, Alessandro
local.contributor.corporatename	College of Computing
relation.isAdvisorOfPublication	d23047b9-62b9-40ea-a94a-2d6222c76191
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication	c8892b3c-8db6-4b7b-a33a-1b67f7db2021
thesis.degree.level	Doctoral