User Guided Automation For Testing Mobile Apps

Mobile devices are gradually taking over traditional computers’dominance in hu-man lives in recent years. With the ever-increasing shipment of mobile apps running on these devices, their quality issues become a severe challenge. Although automated testing techniques are being widely studied, they mostly fall short of handling mobile apps’complex interactions, e.g., a finger swipe or device shaking gesture, leading to inadequate testing. This significantly reduces the attractiveness of existing test automa-tion techniques.In this paper, we present a novel User Guided Automation (UGA) technique to address testing challenges incurred by such complex interactions. The work can be summarized as follows:UGA exploits user insights to complement automated testing techniques by record-ing user-guided app executions, replaying apps to certain stop points, and sys-tematically exploring state space from these stop points.We designed and implemented our approach as a prototype UGA tool on Android platform. The UGA tool is designed for all kinds of users and also supports existing automated testing.The evaluation conducted on seven real-world Android apps shows that UGA achieved 1.59-21.78 x improvement in terms of method coverage over state-of-the-art automated techniques in testing mobile apps.We also studied the factors which effect the result of UGA. The experimen-t shows that UGA’s effectiveness of improving method coverage over existing testing approaches is not affected by users’familiarity with the smartphones.