Managing App Testing Device Clouds: Issues and Opportunities

Because creating and maintaining an in-house test lab is expensive and time-consuming, companies and app developers often use device clouds to test their apps. Because quality-assurance activities depend on such device clouds, it is important to understand possible issues related to their use. To this end, in this paper we present a preliminary study that investigates issues and highlights research opportunities in the context of managing and maintaining device clouds. In the study, we analyzed over 12 million test executions on 110 devices. We found that the management software of the cloud infrastructure we considered affected some test executions, and almost all the cloud devices had at least one security-related issue.