Automated GUI Testing Techniques for Android Applications

Mobile devices are integral parts of our daily lives; a little computer in our pocket has became a faithful assistant both for work than for amusement. The availability of mobile applications (commonly referred as apps) has made more and more useful bringing these devices with us everyday. The number of such applications in these years has faced a tremendous growth due to the market attractiveness; according to Forbes, by 2017 more than 270 billion mobile applications will be downloaded worldwide. The quality of a mobile application is a major concern for developers, users and application stores. According to a survey conducted by SmartBear from October to December 2013 nearly 50% of consumers will delete a mobile app if they encounter a bug. So, testing mobile applications to prevent the occurrence of software exceptions in production can be considered one of the key factor in uencing its quality together with the market response. As today, in literature many techniques have been presented aiming at testing mobile applications. In particular, many of them have been presented in the context of GUI Testing. The research activity described in this thesis is focused on proposing novel techniques and tools in the field of Automated GUI Testing for Mobile Applications. In particular, the work is targeted to the Android Operating System, that currently is the dominating operating system in the mobile devices market, although the results can be generalized to other mobile platforms.