Dominik Franke

Providing a Software Quality Framework for Testing of Mobile Applications

As the number of mobile applications grows software quality becomes more and more an important issue in this realm. An appropriate mobile quality framework would serve developers as a guideline for quality assurance. In this work, we present an approach to a software quality framework for development of mobile applications. This framework is based on a mobile software quality model, defining key qualities of mobile applications. Furthermore the framework provides patterns for mobile application development and metrics for testing mobile applications. It also defines methods and tools for analyzing and testing the specific lifecycles of mobile applications.

A real-time extension to the Android platform

Android belongs to the leading operating systems for mobile devices, e.g. smartphones or tablets. The availability of Androids source code under general public license allows interesting developments and useful modifications of the platform for third parties, like the integration of real-time support. This paper presents an extension of Android improving its real-time capabilities, without loss of original Android functionality and compatibility to existing applications. In our approach we apply the RT_PREEMPT patch to the Linux kernel, modify essential Android components like the Dalvik virtual machine and introduce a new real-time interface for Android developers. The resulting Android system supports applications with real-time requirements, which can be implemented in the same way as non-real-time applications.

Reverse Engineering of Mobile Application Lifecycles

In mobile applications, the application lifecycle consists of the process-related states (e.g. suspended, ready, running) and the transitions between them. A faulty or insufficient implementation of the mobile application lifecycle can be the source of many problematic faults, e.g. loss of data. Thus for a software developer, understanding and mastering the mobile application lifecycle is essential for high quality software. In our work with various mobile platforms, we found that the given lifecycle models and corresponding documentation are often inconsistent, incomplete and incorrect. In this paper we present a way to reverse-engineer application lifecycles of mobile platforms by testing. Within a case study we apply the presented concept to three mobile platforms: Android, iOS and Java ME. We further show how developers of mobile applications can use our results to get correct lifecycle models for these platforms.

Testing Conformance of Life Cycle Dependent Properties of Mobile Applications

Operating systems of modern mobile devices, like e.g. iOS and Android, require the applications to conform to a life cycle model, to ensure the functional correctness of the application and its data integrity over exceptional behavior as e.g. out-swapping of the application. The applications life cycle events are triggered asynchronously by the system and depend on the environment. In order to test life cycle dependent properties of the applications, we define a unit testing based approach that uses life cycle callback-methods. The method identifies life cycle dependent properties in the application specification, and derives assertion-based test cases for validating the conformance of the properties. Life cycle triggers are used in the test case execution. The paper describes to which application features the approach can be applied, and the limitations of the approach. A case study demonstrates how to apply our approach to state-of-the-art mobile platforms, using Android 2.2 as an example.

A Mobile Software Quality Model

The technological progress of mobile devices, the relevance of Internet in todays society and the booming mobile market have revolutionized mobile software in recent years and significantly impact the software quality of mobile interactive devices. Mobile software gets more and more capable and complex, which allows developers to apply well-established quality methods and models, e.g. from the area of desktop-software development, to mobile software. But mobile software also still has its mobile-specific characteristics, thus corresponding models and methods have to be adjusted for usage in the mobile realm. In this paper, we propose a software quality model for the development of mobile applications. We apply the model in a case study to inspect where mobile software quality has evolved in the past and allow an insight, where it might trend to in future.

Non-blocking garbage collection for real-time Android

The Android platform is an open source operating system for mobile devices developed by the Open Handset Alliance. Due to its usability and rich set of functionalities, Android is an attractive platform for both, developers and end-users. RTAndroid is a modified version of the Android 2.2 platform extended with a real-time capable scheduler [11]. This modification aims to enable the domain of industrial applications. But unfortunately, the predictability and deterministic behavior of RTAndroid in its current version highly depend on its memory management components. For instance, explicit memory management cannot be used to free objects that were allocated without the knowledge of the developer. Further, invocations of the native garbage collection result in non-deterministic process suspensions during runtime. This paper presents a concept for a real-time capable, automatic memory management mechanism in order to improve the timing and predictability of the process behavior in RTAndroid. The introduced memory management respects the execution cycles and deadlines of running real-time processes. Empirical evaluations highlight the improvements resulting from the applied system modifications.

Reverse Engineering and Testing Service Life Cycles of Mobile Platforms

Using services on mobile devices for time- and safety-critical applications, like abnormal situation or disaster management, requires a high availability and reliability of the services. To fulfill these quality requirements, a well-understood, -defined and tested life cycle management of the services during runtime is necessary. Understanding service life cycles is crucial, since an insufficient life cycle implementation leads to undesired behavior and data loss. The first part of this paper presents how to reverse engineer the service life cycles of mobile platforms. The second part applies life cycle test approaches from mobile applications to services. The results show how the similarities between mobile application and service life cycles on mobile platforms can be used to develop and apply the same concepts and tools with few modifications for both worlds.

Evaluation of the real-time Java runtime environment for deployment in time-critical systems

This paper evaluates the results of benchmarking an implementation of the Real-Time Specification for Java. First, a motivation is given, which describes the need for applications that realize different levels of timing behavior. The difficulties with such applications are described, also. Then tests for memory allocation, communication buffering, and timer accuracy, which are derived from those difficulties, are formulated. The test results are evaluated in the last section.

Coping with Complexity of Testing Models for Real-Time Embedded Systems

Model based testing techniques are a breakthrough in the modern software development. The integration of state-of the-art tools to automatically generate and evaluate tests from a model of the software product allows reducing the effort of testing activities while maintaining quality. A major problem for model based techniques is however the effort and the timing for the model specification. In practice, modeling for test case generation will often happen during the test phase instead of the design phase, implying that there is a high time pressure within the modeling process. Model views can help to reduce the effort spent for the modeling. In our work, we will present an useful approach to views for timed testing models, thus reducing the complexity of the modeling process.

An Approach for Using Mobile Devices in Industrial Safety-Critical Embedded Systems

With the booming mobile market and increasing capability of mobile devices, mobile platforms like Android emerge from end-user to industrial application areas. This paper sketches an approach to implement industrial safety-critical embedded systems with fail-safe state on the mobile platform Android. The approach consists of safety-critical software design patterns, a real-time extension to the Android platform and fail-safe application life cycle management.