Sapienz: multi-objective automated testing for Android applications

Mao, Ke; Harman, Mark; Jia, Yunyi

doi:10.1145/2931037.2931054

Cited by 447 publications

(383 citation statements)

References 49 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

374

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…To evaluate Mobolic performance, we ran it on 10 downloaded apps and compared the obtained code coverage results and exercising time with other prevalent approaches, including manual testing (Human) and 3 automated ones (Sapienz, ACTEve, and MobiGUITAR). We chose Human for comparison since manual testing can provide the most intelligent inputs.…”

Section: Empirical Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Mobolic: An automated approach to exercising mobile application GUIs using symbiosis of online testing technique and customated input generation

et al. 2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Summary The increasingly prevalent use of mobile devices has raised the popularity of mobile applications. Therefore, automated testing of mobile applications has become an extremely important task. However, it is still a challenge to automatically generate tests with high coverage for mobile applications due to their specific nontrivial structure and the highly interactive nature of graphical user interfaces (GUIs). In this paper, we propose a novel automated GUI testing technique for mobile applications, namely, Mobolic. In this approach, tests with high coverage are automatically generated and executed by combining the online testing technique and customated input generation. Employing the online testing technique, Mobolic systematically explores the app GUI without falling in a loop. It generates relevant events “on the fly” that are followed by an immediate execution. In addition, involving the customated input generation, Mobolic automatically generates relevant user inputs such as user‐predefined, concrete, or random ones. We implemented Mobolic and evaluated its performance on 10 real‐world open‐source Android applications. Our experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of Mobolic in terms of achieved code coverage and overall exercising time.

show abstract

Section: Empirical Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2,7 Consequently, in recent years, many automated GUI testing systems for mobile apps have been developed. [7][8][9][10][11][12][13] Mobolic supports random-input generation. As a result, Mobolic explores the app GUI without human interaction.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobolic: An automated approach to exercising mobile application GUIs using symbiosis of online testing technique and customated input generation

et al. 2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…F-Droid offers direct access to app source code and to their developers through code repository and issue tracker. It has been used in many other studies on Android testing proposed in the literature [21,22,23] and contains a growing number of applications belonging to different categories. ‡ https://f-droid.org/ 10 of 27 AMALFITANO ET AL.…”

Section: Objects Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why does the orientation change mess up my Android application? From GUI failures to code faults

Amalfitano

Riccio

Paiva

et al. 2017

Software Testing Verif & Rel

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

SummaryThis paper investigates the failures exposed in mobile apps by the mobile-specific event of changing the screen orientation. We focus on GUI failures resulting in unexpected GUI states that should be avoided to improve the apps quality and to ensure better user experience. We propose a classification framework that distinguishes 3 main classes of GUI failures due to orientation changes and exploit it in 2 studies that investigate the impact of such failures in Android apps. The studies involved both open-source and apps from Google Play that were specifically tested exposing them to orientation change events. The results showed that more than 88% of these apps were affected by GUI failures, some classes of GUI failures were more common than others, and some GUI objects were more frequently involved. The app source code analysis allowed us to identify 6 classes of common faults causing specific GUI failures. KEYWORDSAndroid bugs, Android testing, GUI failures, GUI testing, mobile testing, orientation change INTRODUCTIONOver the last decade, the number of users of mobile technology and smartphones has increased considerably. The total number of smartphone users worldwide is forecast to surpass 2.5 billion in 2019 [1].This causes a constant demand for new software applications running on these devices (apps). As of the month of June 2016, both Android and iOS users had the opportunity to choose from among more than 2 million apps [2].Mobile technology has radically changed the lifestyle of billions of people around the world. We use mobile apps for several hours every day, entrust them our sensitive data, and perform a large variety of activities through them, including critical tasks.The demand for app quality has grown together with their spread. Apps users require them to be reliable, robust, efficient, secure, usable, etc.As a consequence, software developers should give proper consideration to the quality of their applications by adopting suitable quality assurance techniques, such as testing.In the last decade, the research community has devoted great interest to the mobile app testing field. Several testing approaches have been proposed to assess different quality aspects of mobile applications [3], such as functionality [4], performance [5], security [6,7], responsiveness [8], and energy consumption [9].Since mobile apps are event-driven systems, many proposed techniques solicit them by means of sequences of events [10]. However, because of the peculiarities of the mobile devices, these apps should be tested with appositely crafted approaches [11]. As an example, testing processes should devote particular attention to exercise the apps through mobile-specific events, such as sending an application to the background and resuming it, receiving a call, changing the state of the network connections, or changing the orientation of the device.Among these types of events, the orientation change deserves special attention. It is a peculiar event in mobile platforms that causes the switch of the running app b...

show abstract

“…Thus, to maximize app market success developers aim at attaining high quality software by revealing and fixing potential software bugs as early as possible [14]. As a natural consequence, in last years both researchers and pratictioners developed techniques and tools to automate the testing of mobile applications [8], [12], [13], [21]. Such tools aim to reveal unhandled exceptions while exercising the app under test (AUT) with input and system events.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, the sequence of events recorded by these tools is often redundant, lacks of contextual information and is difficult to analyze [4], [11]. Therefore, developers might struggle to understand the root cause of the crashes highlighted by automated tools [13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

BECLoMA: Augmenting stack traces with user review information

Pelloni

Grano

Ciurumelea

et al. 2018

2018 IEEE 25th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and wearables are changing the way we do things, radically modifying our approach to technology. To sustain the brutal competition in the mobile market, developers need to deliver high quality applications in a short release cycle. Therefore, to maximize their market success, they aim to reveal and fix bugs as soon as possible. For this reason, researchers and practitioners proposed testing tools to automate the process of bug discovery and fixing. In the mobile development context, the content of user reviews represents an unmatched source for developers seeking for defects in their applications. However, no prior work explored the adoption of information available in user reviews for testing purposes. In this demo we present BECLoMA, a tool to enable the integration of user feedback in the testing process of mobile apps. BECLoMA links information from testing tools and user reviews, presenting developers an augmented testing report combining stack traces with user reviews information referring to the same crash. We show that BECLoMA facilitates not only the diagnosis and fix of app bugs, but also presents additional benefits: it eases the usage of testing tools and automates the analysis of user reviews from the Google Play Store. Abstract-Mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and wearables are changing the way we do things, radically modifying our approach to technology. To sustain the high competition characterizing the mobile market, developers need to deliver high quality applications in a short release cycle. To reveal and fix bugs as soon as possible, researchers and practitioners proposed tools to automate the testing process. However, such tools generate a high number of redundant inputs, lacking of contextual information and generating reports difficult to analyze. In this context, the content of user reviews represents an unmatched source for developers seeking for defects in their applications. However, no prior work explored the adoption of information available in user reviews for testing purposes. In this demo we present BECLOMA, a tool to enable the integration of user feedback in the testing process of mobile apps. BECLOMA links information from testing tools and user reviews, presenting to developers an augmented testing report combining stack traces with user reviews information referring to the same crash. We show that BECLOMA facilitates not only the diagnosis and fix of app bugs, but also presents additional benefits: it eases the usage of testing tools and automates the analysis of user reviews from the Google Play Store.

show abstract

Sapienz: multi-objective automated testing for Android applications

Cited by 447 publications

References 49 publications

Mobolic: An automated approach to exercising mobile application GUIs using symbiosis of online testing technique and customated input generation

Mobolic: An automated approach to exercising mobile application GUIs using symbiosis of online testing technique and customated input generation

Why does the orientation change mess up my Android application? From GUI failures to code faults

BECLoMA: Augmenting stack traces with user review information

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About