Enhancing Android Application Bug Reporting
This addresses a specific bottleneck for mobile app developers and testers, though it appears incremental relative to existing bug reporting tools.
The paper tackles the problem of ineffective bug reporting for Android apps by introducing Fusion, a system that auto-completes reproduction steps using GUI analysis, resulting in more reproducible and actionable bug reports.
The modern software development landscape has seen a shift in focus toward mobile applications as smartphones and tablets near ubiquitous adoption. Due to this trend, the complexity of these "apps" has been increasing, making development and maintenance challenging. Current bug tracking systems do not effectively facilitate the creation of bug reports with useful information that will directly lead to a bug's resolution. To address the need for an improved reporting system, we introduce a novel solution, called Fusion, that helps reporters auto-complete reproduction steps in bug reports for mobile apps by taking advantage of their GUI-centric nature. Fusion links information, that reporters provide, to program artifacts extracted through static and dynamic analysis performed beforehand. This allows our system to facilitate the reporting process for developers and testers, while generating more reproducible bug reports with immediately actionable information.