Test2VA: Reusing GUI Test Cases for Voice Assistant Features Development in Mobile Applications

TL;DR

Test2VA leverages existing GUI test cases to automatically generate voice assistant features, reducing development effort and improving efficiency in mobile app voice control integration.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mutation-based approach to extract task patterns from GUI tests for voice assistant feature generation in mobile apps.

Findings

Correctly detects 75.68% of mutable GUI events

Generates 33 executable VA methods

Successfully validated through manual examination

Abstract

Voice Assistant (VA) in smartphones has become very popular with millions of users nowadays. A key trend is the rise of custom VA embedding, which enables users to perform the customized tasks of their favorite app through voice control. However, with such a great demand, little effort has been made to support app developers in VA development. Moreover, many user-oriented VA control approaches even increase the programming burden on developers. To reduce the workload and improve code efficiency, in this paper, we propose a novel approach, Test2VA, that reuses the test code of an application to support its VA development. Specifically, Test2VA extracts the task completion pattern from the GUI test code and then generates an execution method to perform the same task in general. To identify the pattern, Test2VA uses a mutation-based exploration to detect the mutable GUI event in the test case and later parameterize it in the VA method. We conducted an evaluation on 48 test cases from eight real-world applications. The results show that Test2VA correctly detects 75.68% of the mutable events from 48 original test cases and then generates 33 methods and have them successfully executed and manually examined.