Towards automating testing of communicational B3G applications

Mobile phones and laptop users are enjoying the fast and seamless Internet access provided by 3rd generation (3G) mobile technology, which allows the use of applications such as email, WWW, office tools, messaging, and communicating on the move. In the future beyond 3G (B3G) applications, networks and services will create many more opportunities for companies and individuals to use mobile phones in their everyday lives, in group work, information sharing, multi-user games and other purposes. In a mobile environment, these applications use online connections to complex network resources and other users and exchange data with them, for example to retrieve and publish content, collect and use context information from different sources, and use interactive value-added mobile network services such as billing, presence, streaming, and location-based services at the same time. Multiple online connections bring new challenges to the testing of B3G applications. In this paper, we discuss the new testing needs of B3G applications and present an experimental system for automating testing of B3G mobile applications that supports application testing in multiple mobile phones at the same time. We found that the available commercial testing tools support only one mobile phone at a time and therefore they do not efficiently support testing of B3G applications.