Automated Software Testing for AR Mobile Games

Abstract

Continuously testing an application is an important part of software development. Although there are many frameworks dedicated to automating this process, in many cases developers have to manually test their apps. Creating custom solutions can help to save time in development and lead to higher software quality. In this thesis, we created an automated testing framework for Augmented Reality (AR) Android games created in Unity. The proposed solution is not restricted to this specific type of mobile apps and could be interesting for other areas of automated black-box testing for Graphical User Interface (GUI) based applications.

As the device camera acts as input for AR applications, we built custom hardware to emulate the camera input. In contrast to most Android apps, mobile games often use custom rendering pipelines, which make it impossible to directly observe the state of the application under test. Therefore, we take screenshots to observe the state and analyze them to determine whether a test succeeds. We created a user-friendly web interface to create, execute and maintain tests. An innovative feature of this web interface is the so-called LiveEdit mode, which allows creating or modifying a test case whilst the app is simultaneously executing on the device. In contrast to many existing solutions, it does not require a particular background in programming nor knowledge of implementation details as the user interacts with the app in a more interactive and natural way.