Practical Considerations
In this section, we discuss a few practical issues that we
had to address as we built X-Checker.
Where to Generate Test Cases? The first practical consideration
that we addressed was the question of which platform to
use to execute our test generator. One possibility was to use
Windows Phone, Xamarin’s home platform. This requires us
to execute X-Checker directly on a device or emulator running
Windows Phone. However, we found that the environment
on such devices and emulators was somewhat awkward to
use during active development of X-Checker, e.g., to debug
any issues that arose. We therefore decided to develop and
execute X-Checker on a desktop version ofWindows (8.1). Our
hypothesis was that the desktop and phone versions would be
largely similar because they use the same .NET code base, and
as a result, we could use the desktop to generate the test cases
and execute them as apps on Windows Phone and Android
devices.