On-Device Bug Reporting for Android Applications
This addresses the problem for Android application testers and developers by providing automated bug reporting, but it is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks like uiautomator.
The paper tackles the difficulty of reproducing and fixing bugs in mobile applications by presenting ODBR, a tool that records and replays input gestures and sensor events on Android devices, aiming to facilitate more efficient bug fixes.
Bugs that surface in mobile applications can be difficult to reproduce and fix due to several confounding factors including the highly GUI-driven nature of mobile apps, varying contextual states, differing platform versions and device fragmentation. It is clear that developers need support in the form of automated tools that allow for more precise reporting of application defects in order to facilitate more efficient and effective bug fixes. In this paper, we present a tool aimed at supporting application testers and developers in the process of On-Device Bug Reporting. Our tool, called ODBR, leverages the uiautomator framework and low-level event stream capture to offer support for recording and replaying a series of input gesture and sensor events that describe a bug in an Android application.