Quality assurance of mobile applications: A systematic mapping study

Mobile applications have become highly pervasive in recent years. The quality of mobile applications for business use, in particular, is relevant for all stakeholders since application failures can lead to serious consequences, such as damage of corporate reputation or financial loss. For other applications, a reasonable level of quality is also required to convince users to use them. The goal of this work is to identify approaches that address the issue of quality assurance for mobile applications. We present an overview of the identified approaches based on certain viewpoints, such as the focused test level and the addressed quality, and show current research challenges. In order to drive the systematic mapping study, we derived seven research questions based on the stated goal. Then two researchers identified 3,192 records from four digital libraries based on a search string related to terms regarding quality assurance for mobile applications and predefined selection criteria. Ultimately, 230 articles were selected. We created clustered views to answer our seven research questions. In addition, we used surveys found to complement our overview of current challenges. The results show an overall upward trend of publications since 2003. Important topics include automation of GUI tests and assurance of non-functional qualities. Aspects of future research could be the establishment of test environments and the focus on defects addressing stronger the specific characteristics of mobile applications.