Investigando o teste exploratório para aplicações móveis

Abstract

From the 1990s, mobile devices started to emerge, such as smartphones, tablets and e-readers. These devices contain mobile applications, which are briefly called apps. There are a variety of users who use such devices, and consequently make use of apps in their daily lives; therefore, they should not have problems that hinder the user experience. To decrease the incidence of failures in such apps, tests are applied during the Software Engineering process. A technique widely used by the industry is Exploratory Testing (ET), a manual testing approach that dismisses the use of scripts, leading the tester to use his own knowledge and creativity to conduct the tests. In this way, the tester uses his practices and skills, relying less on documentation. The aim of this work is to investigate the use of ET in apps. Specifically, an exploratory study was conducted with several apps, and an experiment was conducted with professionals. The exploratory study was divided into two stages. The first step consisted of testing open source apps and the second one with apps developed by a development company. Based on the obtained results, an extension to the ET was proposed to include an opportunity map (OM). OM is a mental map of scenarios that can be explored for a specific app. In the experiment with professionals, the ET using OM was compared with the traditional ET. We observed positive results regarding the effectiveness of ET in mobile apps. In addition, the experiment revealed that it is possible to make refinements to make ET more effective in detecting bugs. When adopting the OM, the results showed that it detects more bugs and of different types when compared with the traditional ET.