Challenges in Testing Context-Aware Applications

2-11

s upports Context Inconsistency Resolution (CIR) services and a dataflow test criteria to
test context-aware application is then designed. The criteria focus on the propagation of
context variables in the applications, which are potentially affected by CIR services.

2.5 Summary and Conclusions

Context-aware applications running on mobile devices are growing at an enormous
rate. While there are lots of new opportunities in developing new applications, testing
such applications remains a tedious task. Testing context-aware applications is quite
challenging due to the following main factors: there are considerable context variations
is a short period over short distances; the context variables are updated asynchronously
at different rates by different components of the middleware, causing transient inconsistencies between external physical context value and its internal representation within
the application; and it is very difficult to define precise test oracle as the execution differs
under various vectors of context input. Several tools and testing methodologies have
been proposed, but their application domain is relatively limited. The field of contextaware application testing is still in its infancy state, and a large amount of research work
is expected during the next few years.

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