CAT: Change-focused Android GUI Testing
This work provides an incremental improvement in automated GUI testing for Android app developers by focusing on changes, which is a common and critical scenario.
Android apps are frequently updated, but existing GUI testing tools are inefficient for updates as they do not prioritize changes. CAT (Change-focused Android GUI Testing) addresses this by performing change impact analysis to identify affected GUI elements and then generating length-3 GUI event sequences to interact with them. CAT was more effective at interacting with change-affected GUI elements compared to DroidBot and DroidMate, and it detected previously unknown change-related bugs in two apps.
Android Apps are frequently updated, every couple of weeks, to keep up with changing user, hardware and business demands. Correctness of App updates is checked through extensive testing. Recent research has proposed tools for automated GUI event generation in Android Apps. These techniques, however, are not efficient at checking App updates as the generated GUI events do not prioritise updates, and instead explore other App behaviours. We address this need in this paper with CAT (Change-focused Android GUI Testing). For App updates, at the source code or GUI level, CAT performs change impact analysis to identify GUI elements affected by the update. CAT then generates length-3 GUI event sequences to interact with these GUI elements. Our empirical evaluations using 21 publicly available open source Android Apps demonstrated that CAT is able to automatically identify GUI elements affected by App updates, generate and execute length-3 GUI event sequences focusing on change-affected GUI elements. Comparison with two popular GUI event generation tools, DroidBot and DroidMate, revealed that CAT was more effective at interacting with the change-affected GUI elements. Finally, CAT was able to detect previously unknown change-related bugs in two Apps.