The problem we are addressing is the barriers to writing automated test that are easy to
maintain for mobile applications. The solutions that are used by manual (non technical) testers
to create automated scripts are primitive and are incredibly hard to maintain. By supporting
and upskilling a the workforce of manual testers we will be able to save customers a
significant amount of time and money.
SPA Worldwide Limited, trading as GAT provide specialist app testing to the developer
community by testing apps through a crowd of professional testers. Having tested thousands
of apps including companies like Facebook, Spotify and Candy Crush we have identified 2
major trends:
1) Similar bugs appear in multiple apps
2) Apps are built using similar building blocks. For example - messaging feature, social login,
image manipulation, etc.
Every time that someone builds an app or a new feature they have to write and design tests to
make sure that the Functional GUI works. However based on the above two observations,
developers and testers are having to write the same tests every time.
Over the past 2 years we have broken these building blocks down and begun to collate all the
bugs (defects) that we’ve found in each of the sections, and we call that database our Bug
Graph. The Bug Graph was designed to help our testers, by guiding them to spot bugs in an
app.
This proof of concept project aims to automate the many manual steps in the app testing
process, allowing a manual tester to write automation scripts for testing mobile apps. The
most important part of this process is the ability to understand the context of the app so that it
can be maintained easily as the app develops over time. This will be done by utilising a
modular based automated script design that allows script templates to be connected to the
context areas of the app.