CAT: Change-focused Android GUI Testing

TL;DR

CAT is a novel Android GUI testing tool that focuses on change impact analysis to efficiently identify and test GUI elements affected by app updates, improving bug detection and interaction with update-relevant components.

Contribution

This paper introduces CAT, a change-focused testing approach that prioritizes app update-related GUI elements for more effective testing compared to existing tools.

Findings

CAT successfully identified change-affected GUI elements in 21 apps.

CAT outperformed DroidBot and DroidMate in interacting with relevant GUI elements.

CAT detected new bugs related to app updates in two applications.

Abstract

Android Apps are frequently updated, every couple of weeks, to keep up with changing user, hardware and business demands. Correctness of App updates is checked through extensive testing. Recent research has proposed tools for automated GUI event generation in Android Apps. These techniques, however, are not efficient at checking App updates as the generated GUI events do not prioritise updates, and instead explore other App behaviours. We address this need in this paper with CAT (Change-focused Android GUI Testing). For App updates, at the source code or GUI level, CAT performs change impact analysis to identify GUI elements affected by the update. CAT then generates length-3 GUI event sequences to interact with these GUI elements. Our empirical evaluations using 21 publicly available open source Android Apps demonstrated that CAT is able to automatically identify GUI elements affected by App updates, generate and execute length-3 GUI event sequences focusing on change-affected GUI elements. Comparison with two popular GUI event generation tools, DroidBot and DroidMate, revealed that CAT was more effective at interacting with the change-affected GUI elements. Finally, CAT was able to detect previously unknown change-related bugs in two Apps.