Resource Interaction Failures in Mobile Applications: A Challenge for the Software Product Line Testing Community

Context: Many mobile applications run on multiple platforms with specific available resources. These resources are associated with communication capabilities, sensors, and user customization. Certain resource combinations imply interactions between resources that are likely to produce failures in mobile applications, thereby harming the user experience. Challenge: There may be a large number of resource combinations for a single mobile application. Consequently, exhaustively testing resource interactions to spot failures can be very challenging. However, in order to address this challenge, having robust, well-documented, and publicly available datasets for mobile application testing is necessary. Proposal: This paper proposes the Resource Interaction Challenge targeting mobile applications. We introduce a curated dataset of 20 mobile applications with varying sizes (up to 350K lines of code) and required resources (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc.). Due to the shortage of sampling strategies for testing resource interactions in mobile applications, we opted for strategies commonly used for configurable systems in general. Our dataset includes failures detected and source code metrics computed for each mobile application. Conclusion: We expect to engage both researchers and practitioners in reusing our dataset, especially to propose and evaluate novel testing strategies.