A context simulator as testing support for mobile apps

Context-aware mobile applications gain more and more influence on our daily life. Since mobile devices are equipped with various sensors to detect their environment, it is possible to receive and process information from beyond application and device borders. Within the development, these context-aware applications have to be verified to assure that they do not cause any failures. This contribution outlines challenges of testing context-aware mobile applications relating to their context factors and present our approach for a context simulator that provides support for modeling and simulation of context in different levels: physical and logical context, situations and scenarios. The simulator supports test case derivation and enables test case execution for several context sources as part of testing mobile applications.