Automated testing of mobile apps has received significant attention in recent years from researchers and practitioners alike. In this paper, we report on the largest empirical study to date, aimed at understanding the test automation culture prevalent among mobile app developers. We systematically examined more than 3.5 million repositories on GitHub and identified more than 12, 000 non-trivial and real-world Android apps. We then analyzed these non-trivial apps to investigate (1) the prevalence of adoption of test automation; (2) working habits of mobile app developers in regards to automated testing; and (3) the correlation between the adoption of test automation and the popularity of projects. Among others, we found that (1) only 8% of the mobile app development projects leverage automated testing practices; (2) developers tend to follow the same test automation practices across projects; and (3) popular projects, measured in terms of the number of contributors, stars, and forks on GitHub, are more likely to adopt test automation practices. To understand the rationale behind our observations, we further conducted a survey with 148 professional and experienced developers contributing to the subject apps. Our findings shed light on the current practices and future research directions pertaining to test automation for mobile app development. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging.

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Android is a highly fragmented platform with a diverse set of devices and users. To support the deployment of apps in such a heterogeneous setting, Android has introduced dynamic delivery —a new model of software deployment in which optional, device- or user-specific functionalities of an app, called Dynamic Feature Modules (DFMs) , can be installed, as needed, after the app’s initial installation. This model of app deployment, however, has exacerbated the challenges of properly testing Android apps. In this paper, we first describe the results of an extensive study in which we formalized a defect model representing the various conditions under which DFM installations may fail. We then present D elta D roid —a tool aimed at assisting the developers with validating dynamic delivery behavior in their apps by augmenting their existing test suite. Our experimental evaluation using real-world apps corroborates D elta D roid ’s ability to detect many crashes and unexpected behaviors that the existing automated testing tools cannot reveal.