Robot-assisted smartphone performance testing

This paper describes experiences and lessons learned in applying an approach of using a physical robot for testing overall smartphone device performance based on user profiles. The process consists of capturing user actions, abstracting them to usage profiles, transforming these into test models, and generating test cases from the models. The goal is to support performance testing of touch screen devices and applications in a realistic test environment. To achieve this, the tests are based on real-world generated user profiles and executed using a real physical robot, simulating the actual user. Our performance testing targets different attributes of performance such as response times, power and resource usage, and software/hardware aging. Use of different hardware and software configurations in the test scenarios is considered. This work has been performed in close collaboration with industry partners in robotics provider and user industries.