From Feedback to Failure: Automated Android Performance Issue Reproduction

TL;DR

RevPerf is an automated system that leverages user reviews and advanced techniques to reproduce Android performance issues, aiding developers in diagnosing problems more effectively.

Contribution

This paper introduces RevPerf, the first approach to automatically reproduce mobile performance issues by synthesizing app reviews and executing reproduction commands.

Findings

Achieves 72.73% success rate in reproducing issues

Outperforms baseline by 27.28%

Effectively leverages app reviews for issue diagnosis

Abstract

Mobile application performance is a vital factor for user experience. Yet, performance issues are notoriously difficult to detect in development environments, where they often manifest less conspicuously, making their diagnosis more challenging. In this setting, app reviews from users with diverse device configurations can provide timely and context-rich information about emerging performance issues. However, unlike structured bug reports, app reviews are written by end-users and tend to be more ambiguous, with individual reviews often providing only partial descriptions of the underlying issue. To bridge this gap, we present RevPerf, the first approach to automatically reproduce mobile application performance issues by leveraging and synthesizing information from app reviews. RevPerf retrieves complementary reviews via semantic retrieval and uses prompt engineering to integrate them, enriching the original review with performance issue details. An execution agent is then employed to generate and execute commands to reproduce the issue. After executing all necessary steps, the system incorporates multifaceted detection methods to identify performance issues by monitoring Android logs, GUI changes, and system resource utilization during the reproduction process. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves a 72.73% success rate in reproducing performance issues on the constructed dataset, outperforming the best baseline by 27.28%.