Mobile applications have become highly pervasive in recent years. Their quality is essential since application failures can lead to serious consequences, such as damage of corporate reputation or financial loss. The goal of this work is to identify and expose approaches that address the issue of quality assurance for mobile applications. In order to drive our systematic mapping study, we derived eight research questions based on the stated goal. Ultimately, we systematically identified 311 articles based on 4607 captured records. We created clustered views to answer the research questions and used existing surveys to complement our overview of current challenges. The results show an overall upward trend of publications since 2003. Hot topics include automation of GUI tests and assurance of nonfunctional qualities. Aspects of future research could be the integration of review techniques into existing approaches and focusing more strongly on defects addressing the specific characteristics of mobile applications.
