A Concurrent Approach for Improving the Efficiency of Android CTS Testing

• Published in: Journal of Information Science and Engineering Vol. 34; no. 5; pp. 1287 - 1306
• Main Authors: 劉建宏(CHIEN-HUNG LIU), 陳偉凱(WOEI-KAE CHEN), 陳淑玲(SHU-LING CHEN)
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taipei 社團法人中華民國計算語言學學會 01.09.2018; Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica
• Subjects: Cloud computing; Compatibility; Devices; Efficiency; Partitioning; Task scheduling; Android compatibility testing; compatibility test suite; Android testing; CTS; software testing
• ISSN: 1016-2364
• DOI: 10.6688/JISE.201809_34(5).0011

The Compatibility Test Suite (CTS) is a set of JUnit tests presented by Google to help manufactures to ensure if their Android devices are in compliance with the Android compatibility standards. However, the CTS contains a huge number of test cases and, hence, it usually would take several hours to complete the CTS tests. This could seriously affect the development schedule of Android devices, especially when the CTS test is included in the daily system integration. To reduce the time to perform CTS tests and shorten the time-to-market of Android devices, this paper presents a concurrent approach for improving the CTS test efficiency. Particularly, the CTS tests are decomposed into multiple tasks that are executed on different devices concurrently. The execution results of the devices are then merged to generate the CTS test report. In addition, various task scheduling algorithms are employed and different partitioning methods are presented in the approach. A cloud-based testing platform is developed to support the proposed approach. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, several empirical experiments were conducted. The experimental results show that the efficiency of CTS test can be much improved as the number of devices increases. Moreover, the results also indicate that the Longest Job First scheduling and mixed partitioning methods can result in better test efficiency.