Community based testing

Sammanfattning: Currently, Android is the most popular operating system for mobile devices, but at the same time, the market for Android devices is heavily fragmented in terms of available versions, types of devices, models, form-factors and manufactures. As a result, it is virtually impossible to test applications on all existing devices. Testing on a set of the most popular devices is more realistic but can be expensive, which makes it much more difficult for individual developers to create high quality applications. Fortunately, each Android application developer around the world typically owns at least one device which is not used all the time and could be shared with other developers. This way, a community shared pool of Android devices can be created for automated test execution. This master thesis reviews existing testing frameworks that are used for testing Android applications and analyzes existing services that in one way or another try to solve the problem of providing affordable ways of performing testing on real devices.  Main result of this thesis project is a working distributed community based testing service that enables developers to easily connect, share, and execute automated test cases on devices that use Android operating system. Moreover, it provides ways of decreasing overall test execution time by executing parts of tests in parallel on multiple devices and aggregating received results.