GIFdroid: Automated Replay of Visual Bug Reports for Android Apps
This addresses the time-consuming bug reproduction process for Android app developers, though it is an incremental improvement on existing visual bug reporting methods.
The paper tackles the problem of developers struggling to reproduce bugs from visual bug reports by proposing GIFdroid, an automated approach that extracts keyframes from recordings and maps them to GUI states to generate execution traces, achieving high accuracy and efficiency as demonstrated in experiments and a user study.
Bug reports are vital for software maintenance that allow users to inform developers of the problems encountered while using software. However, it is difficult for non-technical users to write clear descriptions about the bug occurrence. Therefore, more and more users begin to record the screen for reporting bugs as it is easy to be created and contains detailed procedures triggering the bug. But it is still tedious and time-consuming for developers to reproduce the bug due to the length and unclear actions within the recording. To overcome these issues, we propose GIFdroid, a light-weight approach to automatically replay the execution trace from visual bug reports. GIFdroid adopts image processing techniques to extract the keyframes from the recording, map them to states in GUI Transitions Graph, and generate the execution trace of those states to trigger the bug. Our automated experiments and user study demonstrate its accuracy, efficiency, and usefulness of the approach.