GLIB: Towards Automated Test Oracle for Graphically-Rich Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces GLIB, an automated test oracle that detects graphical glitches in graphically-rich applications like video games, achieving high accuracy and effectiveness in real-world testing scenarios.

Contribution

GLIB is the first automated code-based approach for detecting non-crashing GUI bugs in graphically-rich applications, using data augmentation techniques.

Findings

GLIB achieves 100% precision and 99.5% recall in bug detection.

GLIB effectively uncovers GUI glitches in real-world games.

Most detected bugs by GLIB have been confirmed and fixed.

Abstract

Graphically-rich applications such as games are ubiquitous with attractive visual effects of Graphical User Interface (GUI) that offers a bridge between software applications and end-users. However, various types of graphical glitches may arise from such GUI complexity and have become one of the main component of software compatibility issues. Our study on bug reports from game development teams in NetEase Inc. indicates that graphical glitches frequently occur during the GUI rendering and severely degrade the quality of graphically-rich applications such as video games. Existing automated testing techniques for such applications focus mainly on generating various GUI test sequences and check whether the test sequences can cause crashes. These techniques require constant human attention to captures non-crashing bugs such as bugs causing graphical glitches. In this paper, we present the first step in automating the test oracle for detecting non-crashing bugs in graphically-rich applications. Specifically, we propose \texttt{GLIB} based on a code-based data augmentation technique to detect game GUI glitches. We perform an evaluation of \texttt{GLIB} on 20 real-world game apps (with bug reports available) and the result shows that \texttt{GLIB} can achieve 100\% precision and 99.5\% recall in detecting non-crashing bugs such as game GUI glitches. Practical application of \texttt{GLIB} on another 14 real-world games (without bug reports) further demonstrates that \texttt{GLIB} can effectively uncover GUI glitches, with 48 of 53 bugs reported by \texttt{GLIB} having been confirmed and fixed so far.