NaviDroid: A Tool for Guiding Manual Android Testing via Hint Moves

TL;DR

NaviDroid is a tool that guides manual Android testing by providing visual hints for next actions, improving coverage and efficiency through state transition graph analysis and path planning.

Contribution

It introduces NaviDroid, a novel tool that enhances manual testing by visualizing hint moves and optimizing exploration paths using a state transition graph.

Findings

High testing coverage achieved

More bugs detected in less time

Participants explored more app states

Abstract

Manual testing, as a complement to automated GUI testing, is the last line of defense for app quality especially in spotting usability and accessibility issues. However, the repeated actions and easy missing of some functionalities make manual testing time-consuming, labor-extensive and inefficient. Inspired by the game candy crush with flashy candies as hint moves for players, we develop a tool named NaviDroid for navigating human testers via highlighted next operations for more effective and efficient testing. Within NaviDroid, it constructs an enriched state transition graph (STG) with the trigger actions as the edges for two involved states. Based on the STG, NaviDroid utilizes the dynamic programming algorithm to plan the exploration path, and augment the run-time GUI with visualized hint moves for testers to quickly explore untested states and avoid duplication. The automated experiments demonstrate the high coverage and efficient path planning of NaviDroid. A user study further confirms its usefulness in the participants covering more states and activities, detecting more bugs within less time compared with the control group. NaviDroid demo video: https://youtu.be/lShFyg_nTA0.