Resource Interaction Failures in Mobile Applications: A Challenge for the Software Product Line Testing Community
Euler Marinho, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Fischer Ferreira, Federal University of Itajubá, Itabira, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Eduardo Fernandes, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
João Paulo Diniz, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Eduardo Figueiredo, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Context: Many mobile applications run on multiple platforms with
specific available resources. These resources are associated with
communication capabilities, sensors, and user customization. Certain resource combinations imply interactions between resources
that are likely to produce failures in mobile applications, thereby
harming the user experience.
Challenge: There may be a large number of resource combinations
for a single mobile application. Consequently, exhaustively testing resource interactions to spot failures can be very challenging.
However, in order to address this challenge, having robust, well-documented, and publicly available datasets for mobile application
testing is necessary.
Proposal: This paper proposes the Resource Interaction Challenge
targeting mobile applications. We introduce a curated dataset of 20
mobile applications with varying sizes (up to 350K lines of code)
and required resources (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc.). Due to the shortage
of sampling strategies for testing resource interactions in mobile
applications, we opted for strategies commonly used for configurable systems in general. Our dataset includes failures detected
and source code metrics computed for each mobile application.
Conclusion: We expect to engage both researchers and practitioners
in reusing our dataset, especially to propose and evaluate novel
testing strategies.