Apsaras: Efficient Allocation of Physical Devices for Android Testing

Physical devices are valuable resources for mobile application testing, especially for compatibility testing on diverse Android devices with customized specifications of manufacturers and different operating system versions. In order to cover as many kinds of devices as possible, large quantity of physical devices are needed. Therefore, how to allocate mobile devices efficiently among testing tasks becomes a problem for engineers. We address this challenge by proposing efficient resource scheduling policy across diverse application testing frameworks. Specifically, we abstract the components of testing platforms into valid testing models. Based on the testing models, a Wait-time Fairness scheduling strategy is proposed to efficiently allocate devices among testing jobs. We have implemented our approach in a platform called Apsaras and conducted experiments on 80 physical Android devices. Results show that our approach, comparing with traditional testing methods, can carry out testing jobs more efficiently and more fairly.