GAppium: A Framework to Enact Gamification Mechanics in Appium Inspector

The testing process is a fundamental part of the software development cycle. One of the most used techniques to verify the proper functioning of mobile applications is Exploratory Testing. Exploratory Testing consists in a tester freely exploring the Graphical User Interface of the Application Under Test to detect anomalies and bugs. However, such a testing approach requires a large amount of time and has proven to be expensive and monotonous. A possible solution to mitigate the repetitiveness of human-performed activities is gamification. In recent years, several efforts have been made towards the introduction of gamification into the testing process. The goal of this paper is to provide a guide showing how to extend an existing open source Exploratory Testing tool by introducing gamification elements, to make the Exploratory Testing process more engaging and improve the testers' performances. We provide an example of a possible implementation of gamification dynamics: a progress bar that shows the tester the current progress. We believe that this kind of contribution can be useful and inspiring to the community working in the field.