Automation Support for Mobile App Quality Assurance – A Tool Landscape

Competitive pressure in app stores, as well as direct and transparent feedback of app store reviews have resulted in an increased demand for outstanding app quality and user experience. At the same time, reduced time-to-market, decreased budgets and time available for quality assurance, and careful user experience design have to be considered. In response, an enormous market for mobile app quality and user experience measurement tools has grown around the mobile app store ecosystems. Developers following lean and agile development approaches continuously produce new features and ready-to-ship software increments. In those settings, budgets for evaluation and familiarization into new tools are very limited. Currently there are alone more than 28 tools and frameworks for functional test automation and more than 16 different device clouds available. For most of the software developing companies, it is impossible to evaluate and test all of them. In this paper, we present a classification in order to help navigation through the mobile app quality tools landscape for easier selection and more targeted evaluation of tools.