Guided Bug Crush: Assist Manual GUI Testing of Android Apps via Hint Moves

Abstract

Mobile apps are indispensable for people's daily life. Complementing with automated testing, manual testing is the last line of defence for app quality. However, the repeated actions and easily missing of functionalities make manual testing time-consuming and inefficient. Inspired by the game candy crush with flashy candies as hint moves for players, we propose an approach named NaviDroid for navigating testers via highlighted next operations for more effective and efficient testing. Within NaviDroid, we construct an enriched state transition graph with the triggering actions as the edges for two involved states. Based on it, we utilize the dynamic programming algorithm to plan the exploration path, and augment the GUI with visualized hints for testers to quickly explore untested activities and avoid duplicate explorations. The automated experiments demonstrate the high coverage and efficient path planning of NaviDroid and a user study further confirms its usefulness. It can help us develop more robust software that works in more missioncritical settings, not only by performing more thorough testing with the same effort that has been put in before, but also by integrating these techniques into different parts of development pipeline.

Auto-Icon+: An Automated End-to-End Code Generation Tool for Icon Designs in UI Development

“…Digital devices such as computer, mobile phone and tablets are widely used. To ensure the quality of software, many research works have been conducted [13,40,65]. Most of these works focus on the functionality and usability of apps such as GUI design [16,19,21,35,64,104,112], GUI animation linting [109,110], localization [34,98,104], privacy and security [22,23,26,33], and performance [62,111].…”

App Review Driven Collaborative Bug Finding

“…Unfortunately, the fast iteration in app updates often results in defects being found by users after releases [3]. Various research efforts based on static analysis [14,19,48] and dynamic testing [13,50,6,45,22] have therefore been carried out to detect bugs before releasing apps. Bug-free apps remain however a myth and even popular apps, which are intensively used by large user communities, often display simple but annoying defects [6,1,47].…”