Test Transfer Across Mobile Apps Through Semantic Mapping

GUI-based testing has been primarily used to examine the functionality and usability of mobile apps. Despite the numerous GUI-based test input generation techniques proposed in the literature, these techniques are still limited by (1) lack of context-aware text inputs; (2) failing to generate expressive tests; and (3) absence of test oracles. To address these limitations, we propose CraftDroid, a framework that leverages information retrieval, along with static and dynamic analysis techniques, to extract the human knowledge from an existing test suite for one app and transfer the test cases and oracles to be used for testing other apps with the similar functionalities. Evaluation of CraftDroid on real-world commercial Android apps corroborates its effectiveness by achieving 73% precision and 90% recall on average for transferring both the GUI events and oracles. In addition, 75% of the attempted transfers successfully generated valid and feature-based tests for popular features among apps in the same category.

How does CraftDroid work?

Figure below provides an overview of CraftDroid consisting of three major components: (1) Test Augmentation component that augments test cases available for an existing app, i.e., source app, with the information extracted from its GUI widgets that are exercised during test execution, (2) Model Extraction component that uses program analysis techniques to retrieve the GUI widgets and identify transitions between Activity components of a target app, and (3) Test Generation component that leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to compute similarity between GUI widgets of the source and target apps to transfer tests.

[CraftDroid picture]

Artifacts

The artifacts are available for download from here.

Publications

More details about this project can be found in our publication below:


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