Eclipse is a development environment that has been extended by M-eux Test with the necessary functionality to create test scripts against mobile applications by recognizing the user interface objects on the mobile device. The benefit of using Eclipse for creating automated test cases is that you have now one platform for development and testing, scripts can run in parallel on different mobile devices and compiled test scripts can be disturbed to external companies which ensures IP protection.

M-eux Test installs as a plug-in for Eclipse. The scripts can be created by recording or programming or a mix of both. The user interface objects are stored as java classes. The intelli-sense of Eclipse can be used to create the script.

With the M-eux Test add-in loaded, Eclipse can recognize the user interface elements on the actual device or in the emulator/simulator.

All user interface objects are directly recognized by their attributes. This ensures:

• Recording from the actual device or emulator
• Replay on the actual device or emulator
• Recognition of standard GUI elements on the mobile display
• Recognition of standard HTML elements rendered in the mobile browser.
• GUI learn functionality
• GUI class mapping functionality for customized objects.
• Creation of an Object Pool that can be shared between Eclipse based test cases.
• Parallel execution of test scripts on one PC.
• Bitmap verification
• OCR support for text retrieval from bitmaps.
• extended support for .Net Compact framework applications.

The following figure shows a part of the set of attributes recognized by the tool of the iPhone list user interface object.

Using these attributes, the tool can manipulate and verify all characteristics of the mobile user interface object. No bitmap scraping or pattern matching or OCR techniques are applied ensuring high reliability and re-use of the test scripts.

The tool has proven its value in testing mobile applications handling dynamic data or mobile applications that are localized.

The tool contains also utility functions in order to complete the support for testing mobile applications. For example: incoming phone calls can be intercepted. SMS, e-mail messages can be sent from the background. Also diagnostic functions are available showing for example the memory allocation, the number of processes running on the device and many other functions related to the hardware and software configuration of the device.