Improving mobile user interface testing with model driven monkey search
Doyle, Jordan, Saber, TakfarinasORCID: 0000-0003-2958-7979, Arcaini, PaoloORCID: 0000-0002-6253-4062 and Ventresque, AnthonyORCID: 0000-0003-2064-1238
(2021)
Improving mobile user interface testing with model driven monkey search.
In: 2021 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW), 12-16 April 2021, Porto de Galinhas, Brazil (Online).
Testing mobile applications often relies on tools, such
as Exerciser Monkey for Android systems, that simulate user
input. Exerciser Monkey, for example, generates random events
(e.g., touches, gestures, navigational keys) that give developers a
sense of what their application will do when deployed on real
mobile phones with real users interacting with it. These tools,
however, have no knowledge of the underlying applications’ structures and only interact with them randomly or in a predefined
manner (e.g., if developers designed scenarios, a labour-intensive
task) – making them slow and poor at finding bugs.
In this paper, we propose a novel control flow structure able
to represent the code of Android applications, including all the
interactive elements. We show that our structure can increase
the effectiveness (higher coverage) and efficiency (removing
duplicate/redundant tests) of the Exerciser Monkey by giving it
knowledge of the test environment. We compare the interface
coverage achieved by the Exerciser Monkey with our new
Monkey++ using a depth first search of our control flow structure
and show that while the random nature of Exerciser Monkey
creates slow test suites of poor coverage, the test suite created
by a depth first search is one order of magnitude faster and
achieves full coverage of the user interaction elements. We believe
this research will lead to a more effective and efficient Exerciser
Monkey, as well as better targeted search based techniques for
automated Android testing.
Metadata
Item Type:
Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Event Type:
Conference
Refereed:
Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:
Android; Control Flow Graph; Exerciser Monkey; Test Generation