Test Migration Between Mobile Apps with Similar Functionality

FrUITeR: a framework for evaluating UI test reuse

“…To reduce the manual effort of writing usage-based tests, recent research has explored reusing existing tests in a source app to generate new tests automatically for a target app [20,21,23,25,28]. The guiding insight is that different apps expose common functionalities via semantically similar GUI elements.…”

“…Four recent techniques have targeted usage-based test reuse across Android apps [20,21,23,25]. 1 While these techniques have shown promise, we have identified five important limitations that hinder their comparability, reproducibility, and reusability.…”

“…This imposes a practical limit on the number of tests that can be evaluated. For instance, the authors of ATM [21] had to restrict their comparison with GTM [20] to a randomly selected 50% of the possible source-target app combinations due to the task's scale.…”

“…3 There are no standardized guidelines for conducting the manual inspections, making the evaluation results biased and hard to reproduce. For instance, ATM's authors acknowledge the possibility of mistakes in the manual process [21]. Such mistakes are currently hard to locate, verify, or eliminate by other researchers.…”

“…This makes it difficult to isolate and compare their relevant components. For instance, GTM [20], ATM [21], and CraftDroid [25] all contain functionality to compute a łsimilarity scorež between two GUI elements, but it is unclear which of those specific components performs the best against the same baseline. This would impede subsequent research that could potentially benefit from identifying underlying components that should be reused and/or improved.…”