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Automating UI tests for mobile applications with formal gesture descriptions

Published: 23 September 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Touch- and gesture-based interfaces are common in applications for mobile devices. By evolving into mass market products, smartphones and tablets created an increased need for specialized software engineering methods. To ensure high quality applications, constant and efficient testing is crucial in software development. However, testing mobile applications is still cumbersome, time-consuming and error-prone. One reason is the devices' focus on touch-based interaction - gestures cannot be easily incorporated into automated application tests. We present an extension to the popular Calabash testing framework solving this problem by allowing to describe gestures with a formal language in tests scripts.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    MobileHCI '14: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices & services
    September 2014
    664 pages
    ISBN:9781450330046
    DOI:10.1145/2628363
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 23 September 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. gesture formalization
    2. gestures
    3. mobile applications
    4. software engineering
    5. test automation
    6. testing

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    MobileHCI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 35 of 124 submissions, 28%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 202 of 906 submissions, 22%

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    • (2024)Towards a Framework for Evaluating Synthetic Surface GesturesCompanion Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems10.1145/3660515.3661327(22-30)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
    • (2023)Not What I was Trained for – Out-of-Distribution-Tests for Interactive AIsEngineering Interactive Computer Systems. EICS 2023 International Workshops and Doctoral Consortium10.1007/978-3-031-59235-5_12(127-147)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2023
    • (2022)Software Engineering for Augmented Reality - A Research AgendaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35322056:EICS(1-34)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2022
    • (2021)Understanding Players’ Interaction Patterns with Mobile Game App UI via VisualizationsProceedings of the Ninth International Symposium of Chinese CHI10.1145/3490355.3490357(9-21)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2021
    • (2019)GestureCardsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33311643:EICS(1-35)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2019
    • (2019)Automated functional testing of mobile applicationsSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-018-9418-627:1(149-201)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2019
    • (2018)What Are We Missing When Testing Our Android Apps?Computer10.1109/MC.2018.214102451:4(60-68)Online publication date: Apr-2018
    • (2017)ANDROFLEET: testing WiFi peer-to-peer mobile apps in the largeProceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.5555/3155562.3155686(961-966)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2017
    • (2017)A multi-touch-recognizer for gesturecardsProceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems10.1145/3102113.3102132(75-80)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2017
    • (2017)Extending and validating gestUI using technical action research2017 11th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS)10.1109/RCIS.2017.7956558(341-352)Online publication date: May-2017
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