DroidLeaks: Benchmarking Resource Leak Bugs for Android Applications
This work addresses the problem of benchmarking resource leak detection techniques for Android developers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing detection methods.
The authors tackled the lack of common benchmarks for resource leak detection in Android apps by mining 124,215 code revisions to find 298 fixed leaks across 32 apps, and they implemented a static checker that effectively locates real leaks, confirming its usefulness.
Resource leak bugs in Android apps are pervasive and can cause serious performance degradation and system crashes. In recent years, several resource leak detection techniques have been proposed to assist Android developers in correctly managing system resources. Yet, there exist no common bug benchmarks for effectively and reliably comparing such techniques and quantitatively evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. This paper describes our initial contribution towards constructing such a benchmark. To locate real resource leak bugs, we mined 124,215 code revisions of 34 large-scale open-source Android apps. We successfully found 298 fixed resource leaks, which cover a diverse set of resource classes, from 32 out of the 34 apps. To understand the characteristics of these bugs, we conducted an empirical study, which revealed the root causes of frequent resource leaks in Android apps and common patterns of faults made by developers. With our findings, we further implemented a static checker to detect a common pattern of resource leaks in Android apps. Experiments showed that the checker can effectively locate real resource leaks in popular Android apps, confirming the usefulness of our work.