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research-article

Preference-wise Testing of Android Apps via Test Amplification

Authors:

Xuandong LiAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Volume 32, Issue 1

Article No.: 4, Pages 1 - 37

https://doi.org/10.1145/3511804

Published: 13 February 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Preferences, the setting options provided by Android, are an essential part of Android apps. Preferences allow users to change app features and behaviors dynamically, and therefore their impacts need to be considered when testing the apps. Unfortunately, few test cases explicitly specify the assignments of valid values to the preferences, or configurations, under which they should be executed, and few existing mobile testing tools take the impact of preferences into account or provide help to testers in identifying and setting up the configurations for running the tests. This article presents the Prefest approach to effective testing of Android apps with preferences. Given an Android app and a set of test cases for the app, Prefest amplifies the test cases with a small number of configurations to exercise more behaviors and detect more bugs that are related to preferences. In an experimental evaluation conducted on real-world Android apps, amplified test cases produced by Prefest from automatically generated test cases covered significantly more code of the apps and detected seven real bugs, and the tool’s test amplification time was at the same order of magnitude as the running time of the input test cases. Prefest’s effectiveness and efficiency in amplifying programmer-written test cases was comparable with that in amplifying automatically generated test cases.

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Cited By

Wang J(2024)Research on Intelligent Analysis Method for the Impact of Running APP Software on Physical Fitness Indicators of College StudentsEAI Endorsed Transactions on Pervasive Health and Technology10.4108/eetpht.10.550610Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.4108/eetpht.10.5506
Marinho E(2024)Characterizing Resource Interaction Failures in Mobile ApplicationsProceedings of the 28th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference10.1145/3646548.3676601(11-16)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646548.3676601
Ji RZhu TZhu XChen CPan MZhang TBissyandé TKlein JBird CSarro F(2023)Vision-Based Widget Mapping for Test Migration across Mobile Platforms: Are We There Yet?Proceedings of the 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00068(1416-1428)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2023
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Index Terms

Preference-wise Testing of Android Apps via Test Amplification
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology Volume 32, Issue 1

January 2023

954 pages

ISSN:1049-331X

EISSN:1557-7392

DOI:10.1145/3572890

Editor:
Mauro Pezzè
USI Università della Svizzera italiana and SIT Schaffhausen Institute of Technology, Switzerland

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 February 2023

Online AM: 19 April 2022

Accepted: 14 January 2022

Revised: 14 December 2021

Received: 16 August 2020

Published in TOSEM Volume 32, Issue 1

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Leading-edge Technology Program of Jiangsu Natural Science Foundation
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Hong Kong RGC General Research Fund (GRF)

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Cited By

Wang J(2024)Research on Intelligent Analysis Method for the Impact of Running APP Software on Physical Fitness Indicators of College StudentsEAI Endorsed Transactions on Pervasive Health and Technology10.4108/eetpht.10.550610Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.4108/eetpht.10.5506
Marinho E(2024)Characterizing Resource Interaction Failures in Mobile ApplicationsProceedings of the 28th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference10.1145/3646548.3676601(11-16)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646548.3676601
Ji RZhu TZhu XChen CPan MZhang TBissyandé TKlein JBird CSarro F(2023)Vision-Based Widget Mapping for Test Migration across Mobile Platforms: Are We There Yet?Proceedings of the 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00068(1416-1428)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00068
Nie LSaid KMa LZheng YZhao Y(2023)A systematic mapping study for graphical user interface testing on mobile appsIET Software10.1049/sfw2.1212317:3(249-267)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1049/sfw2.12123

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