How developers detect and fix performance bottlenecks in Android apps

Linares‐Vásquez, Mario; Vendome, Christopher; Luo, Qi; Poshyvanyk, Denys

doi:10.1109/icsm.2015.7332486

Cited by 71 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Despite the plethora of methods, techniques, and tools available for automated testing, manual testing of mobile apps is preferred over automated testing due to several factors including personal preferences, organizational restrictions, and current tools lacking important functionality [1], [3], [88]. These factors are rooted in a set of challenges that makes mobile app testing a complex and time-consuming task, stemming from both the inherent properties of mobile smart devices as well as unique pressures and constraints on mobile development teams.…”

Section: Challenges For Enabling Cel Mobile Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other sources of "flakiness" are varying runtime device states that depend on the available resources when executing the tests. For instance, GC (Garbage Collection) events (in Android apps) can be randomly triggered when the device is running out of memory, and these events can induce GUI lag and even Application Not Responding (ANR) errors [88], [96]. Automation API/Frameworks such as Espresso execute GUI events in test cases only when the GUI is idle, which reduces the risk of flaky tests because of longerthan-expected inter-arrival delays.…”

Section: B Test Flakinessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In terms of security testing, while approaches for identification of mobile malware have been an active topic of research [120], [121] test case generation, or automated identification of security vulnerabilities can still be made practical and more robust. Other than studies into the topic [88], [96], automated approaches addressing performance testing have also not been extensively investigated. Finally, automated game or play-testing is known to be a technically difficult issue.…”

Section: G Missing Support For Multi-goal Automated Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Continuous, Evolutionary and Large-Scale: A New Perspective for Automated Mobile App Testing

Linares‐Vásquez

Moran

Poshyvanyk

2017

2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

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Abstract-Mobile app development involves a unique set of challenges including device fragmentation and rapidly evolving platforms, making testing a difficult task. The design space for a comprehensive mobile testing strategy includes features, inputs, potential contextual app states, and large combinations of devices and underlying platforms. Therefore, automated testing is an essential activity of the development process. However, current state of the art of automated testing tools for mobile apps poses limitations that has driven a preference for manual testing in practice. As of today, there is no comprehensive automated solution for mobile testing that overcomes fundamental issues such as automated oracles, history awareness in test cases, or automated evolution of test cases.In this perspective paper we survey the current state of the art in terms of the frameworks, tools, and services available to developers to aid in mobile testing, highlighting present shortcomings. Next, we provide commentary on current key challenges that restrict the possibility of a comprehensive, effective, and practical automated testing solution. Finally, we offer our vision of a comprehensive mobile app testing framework, complete with research agenda, that is succinctly summarized along three principles: Continuous, Evolutionary and Large-scale (CEL).

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Section: Challenges For Enabling Cel Mobile Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: B Test Flakinessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: G Missing Support For Multi-goal Automated Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Continuous, Evolutionary and Large-Scale: A New Perspective for Automated Mobile App Testing

Linares‐Vásquez

Moran

Poshyvanyk

2017

2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

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“…After the extraction and filtering, we emailed the survey to 10,000 email addresses from which we got 485 survey responses. We discarded 5 responses in which the participant reported 0 years of experience in Android programming, 3 with invalid [21], 83 in [39], 200 (188 developers + 12 experts) in [37], and 485 in [44]. In addition, the claimed programming experience is diverse for the three cases: general programming, Android programming, and industrial experience.…”

Section: Design Of the Empirical Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

How do Developers Test Android Applications?

Linares‐Vásquez

Bernal-Cárdenas

Moran

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

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Enabling fully automated testing of mobile applications has recently become an important topic of study for both researchers and practitioners. A plethora of tools and approaches have been proposed to aid mobile developers both by augmenting manual testing practices and by automating various parts of the testing process. However, current approaches for automated testing fall short in convincing developers about their benefits, leading to a majority of mobile testing being performed manually. With the goal of helping researchers and practitioners -who design approaches supporting mobile testing -to understand developer's needs, we analyzed survey responses from 102 open source contributors to Android projects about their practices when performing testing. The survey focused on questions regarding practices and preferences of developers/testers in-the-wild for (i) designing and generating test cases, (ii) automated testing practices, and (iii) perceptions of quality metrics such as code coverage for determining test quality. Analyzing the information gleaned from this survey, we compile a body of knowledge to help guide researchers and professionals toward tailoring new automated testing approaches to the need of a diverse set of open source developers.

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“…This section investigates the detection abilities of these two techniques on framework exceptions (categorized in Section 4.2). In particular, we select three state-of-the-art testing tools, i.e., Monkey, Sapienz, and Stoat; and four static analysis tools widely used by android developers [53], i.e., Lint, FindBugs, PMD, and SonarQube. Lint, developed by Google, detects code structural problems, and scans for android-specific bugs [27].…”

Section: Rq3: Auditing Bug Detection Toolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Large-scale analysis of framework-specific exceptions in Android apps

Fan

Chen

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Mobile apps have become ubiquitous. For app developers, it is a key priority to ensure their apps' correctness and reliability. However, many apps still suffer from occasional to frequent crashes, weakening their competitive edge. Large-scale, deep analyses of the characteristics of real-world app crashes can provide useful insights to guide developers, or help improve testing and analysis tools. However, such studies do not exist -this paper fills this gap. Over a four-month long effort, we have collected 16,245 unique exception traces from 2,486 open-source Android apps, and observed that framework-specific exceptions account for the majority of these crashes. We then extensively investigated the 8,243 frameworkspecific exceptions (which took six person-months): (1) identifying their characteristics (e.g., manifestation locations, common fault categories), (2) evaluating their manifestation via state-of-the-art bug detection techniques, and (3) reviewing their fixes. Besides the insights they provide, these findings motivate and enable follow-up research on mobile apps, such as bug detection, fault localization and patch generation. In addition, to demonstrate the utility of our findings, we have optimized Stoat, a dynamic testing tool, and implemented ExLocator, an exception localization tool, for Android apps. Stoat is able to quickly uncover three previously-unknown, confirmed/fixed crashes in Gmail and Google+; ExLocator is capable of precisely locating the root causes of identified exceptions in real-world apps. Our substantial dataset is made publicly available to share with and benefit the community. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging; * Ting Su, Lihua Xu and Geguang Pu are the corresponding authors. Lingling Fan and Ting Su contributed equally to this work.

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How developers detect and fix performance bottlenecks in Android apps

Cited by 71 publications

References 15 publications

Continuous, Evolutionary and Large-Scale: A New Perspective for Automated Mobile App Testing

Continuous, Evolutionary and Large-Scale: A New Perspective for Automated Mobile App Testing

How do Developers Test Android Applications?

Large-scale analysis of framework-specific exceptions in Android apps

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