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Improving mobile user interface testing with model driven monkey search

Doyle, Jordan, Saber, Takfarinas orcid logoORCID: 0000-0003-2958-7979, Arcaini, Paolo orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-6253-4062 and Ventresque, Anthony orcid logoORCID: 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).

Abstract
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
Subjects:UNSPECIFIED
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Research Institutes and Centres > Lero: The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre
Published in: 2021 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW). . IEEE.
Publisher:IEEE
Official URL:https://doi.org/10.1109%2Ficstw52544.2021.00034
Copyright Information:© 2021 The Authors
Use License:This item is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. View License
Funders:Science Foundation Ireland grants 13/RC/2094 P2 and 17/RC-PhD/3485, ERATO HASUO Metamathematics for Systems Design Project (No. JPMJER1603), JST; Funding Reference number: 10.13039/501100009024 ERATO.
ID Code:26124
Deposited On:16 Sep 2021 12:18 by Takfarinas Saber . Last Modified 16 Sep 2021 12:18
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