Guided Bug Crush: Assist Manual GUI Testing of Android Apps via Hint Moves

TL;DR

NaviDroid is a guided GUI testing approach for Android apps that uses visual hints and path planning to improve testing efficiency and coverage, inspired by game mechanics like Candy Crush.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hint-based navigation system with an enriched state transition graph and dynamic programming for efficient exploration in manual GUI testing.

Findings

Achieves high coverage in automated experiments

Demonstrates efficient path planning for testing

User study confirms improved testing effectiveness

Abstract

Mobile apps are indispensable for people's daily life. Complementing with automated GUI testing, manual testing is the last line of defence for app quality. However, the repeated actions and easily missing of functionalities make manual testing time-consuming and inefficient. Inspired by the game candy crush with flashy candies as hint moves for players, we propose an approach named NaviDroid for navigating testers via highlighted next operations for more effective and efficient testing. Within NaviDroid, we construct an enriched state transition graph with the triggering actions as the edges for two involved states. Based on it, we utilize the dynamic programming algorithm to plan the exploration path, and augment the GUI with visualized hints for testers to quickly explore untested activities and avoid duplicate explorations. The automated experiments demonstrate the high coverage and efficient path planning of NaviDroid and a user study further confirms its usefulness. The NaviDroid can help us develop more robust software that works in more mission-critical settings, not only by performing more thorough testing with the same effort that has been put in before, but also by integrating these techniques into different parts of development pipeline.