May’s International Developer magazine has an article by Mercury Interactive on testing mobile applications. The author makes a reasonable argument that developers of enterprise mobile applications, like developers of desktop or server-based applications, should use automated test approaches.

Part of the author’s argument rests upon the high level of variability in the mobile domain. Handsets themselves have many different device characteristics and features. But even the same handset can have different software installed by different operators (e.g. enterprise class security or applications support). With operators and handset manufacturers working “to differentiate themselves by offering maybe 20 or 30 new types of handset to the market every year” there’s no indication that this problem will get any easier.

It’s not clear whether the author is advocating a Software Product Line approach to mobile application development but this would allow mobile application developers to develop multiple application variants efficiently. If they did so by developing feature models to capture the product line variability then they could also use those feature models to derive variant-specific automated tests to perform. Running only those tests that are appropriate would reduce overall testing time and would potentially eliminate tests that should fail for the specific handset variant.