The testing method based on image analysis for automated detection of UI defects intended for mobile applications

Abstract

Large amounts of defects found in applications are classified as user interface defects. As more and more applications are provided for smart phones, it is reasonable to test those applications on various possible configurations of mobile devices such as screen resolution, OS version and custom layer. However, the set of mobile devices configurations is quite large. Developers are limited to testing their applications on all possible configurations. In this paper, we present an idea of the testing method for automated detection of UI defects intended for mobile applications. The testing method is based on static testing approach. It allows (1) to extract navigation model by code analysis of the application under test, (2) to execute application on a large set of mobile devices with different configurations (mobile cluster), (3) to capture images of application windows on each devices, (4) and to perform detection of defects by analyzing each image and comparing with predefined list of possible user interface defects.