# Automatically Discovering, Reporting and Reproducing Android Application Crashes

## TL;DR

CRASHSCOPE is an automated tool that systematically explores Android apps to detect crashes, generate detailed reports, and produce reproducible scripts, aiding developers in debugging and fixing app failures.

## Contribution

This paper introduces CRASHSCOPE, a novel automated approach combining static and dynamic analysis for crash detection and detailed report generation in Android apps.

## Key findings

- CRASHSCOPE detects crashes as effectively as existing tools.
- It provides more detailed and readable crash reports.
- Crash reproduction is reliable using CRASHSCOPE's scripts.

## Abstract

Mobile developers face unique challenges when detecting and reporting crashes in apps due to their prevailing GUI event-driven nature and additional sources of inputs (e.g., sensor readings). To support developers in these tasks, we introduce a novel, automated approach called CRASHSCOPE. This tool explores a given Android app using systematic input generation, according to several strategies informed by static and dynamic analyses, with the intrinsic goal of triggering crashes. When a crash is detected, CRASHSCOPE generates an augmented crash report containing screenshots, detailed crash reproduction steps, the captured exception stack trace, and a fully replayable script that automatically reproduces the crash on a target device(s). We evaluated CRASHSCOPE's effectiveness in discovering crashes as compared to five state-of-the-art Android input generation tools on 61 applications. The results demonstrate that CRASHSCOPE performs about as well as current tools for detecting crashes and provides more detailed fault information. Additionally, in a study analyzing eight real-world Android app crashes, we found that CRASHSCOPE's reports are easily readable and allow for reliable reproduction of crashes by presenting more explicit information than human written reports.