Towards a Perspective-Based Usage of Mobile Failure Patterns to Focus Quality Assurance

Abstract

The use of mobile applications for business tasks calls for effective quality assurance during development to prevent potential failures of the mobile application and the consequential costs. Essential activities of quality assurance are to inspect the requirements specification and to test the realized mobile application. Both activities ideally benefit from the knowledge of typical failure patterns in order to guide quality assurance engineers and to focus the quality assurance, i.e., to direct the attention of quality assurance on these failure patterns. For this purpose, a mobile-specific failure pattern classification was derived in previous work. In this paper, we introduce an initial quality assurance approach, which considers inspection and testing in a combined way and methodically uses the classification within the mobile context. The developed method FIT4Apps, which is based on the flexible, efficient reading technique perspective-based reading, allows purposeful use of the proposed failure pattern classification. As proof of concept, we developed a tool prototype, which generates basic perspective-based scenarios considering the derived failure pattern classification in order to support inspection and testing activities.