Title
Automated Test Input Generation for Android: Are We There Yet? (E)
Abstract
Like all software, mobile applications (\"apps\") must be adequately tested to gain confidence that they behave correctly. Therefore, in recent years, researchers and practitioners alike have begun to investigate ways to automate apps testing. In particular, because of Android's open source nature and its large share of the market, a great deal of research has been performed on input generation techniques for apps that run on the Android operating systems. At this point in time, there are in fact a number of such techniques in the literature, which differ in the way they generate inputs, the strategy they use to explore the behavior of the app under test, and the specific heuristics they use. To better understand the strengths and weaknesses of these existing approaches, and get general insight on ways they could be made more effective, in this paper we perform a thorough comparison of the main existing test input generation tools for Android. In our comparison, we evaluate the effectiveness of these tools, and their corresponding techniques, according to four metrics: ease of use, ability to work on multiple platforms, code coverage, and ability to detect faults. Our results provide a clear picture of the state of the art in input generation for Android apps and identify future research directions that, if suitably investigated, could lead to more effective and efficient testing tools for Android.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/ASE.2015.89
Proceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
Test input generation,automated testing,Android apps
Code coverage,Android (operating system),Systems engineering,Computer science,Usability,Heuristics,Human–computer interaction,Software,Strengths and weaknesses,Java,Humanoid robot,Embedded system
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
abs/1503.07217
1527-1366
150
PageRank 
References 
Authors
3.46
28
3
Search Limit
100150
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shauvik Roy Choudhary134516.08
Alessandra Gorla277131.76
Alessandro Orso33550172.85