Research On Sketch-guided GUI Test Generation For Mobile Applications

Mobile applications with complex GUIs are becoming more and more popular,the related application fields are also becoming more and more widely.The security and reliability of mobile applications are also becoming increasingly important.Software testing plays an important role in improving the security and reliability of mobile applications.However,generating test cases for these applications is often tedious and professional work in the currently proposed test solutions.Take the two commonly used manual test solutions,the manually designed elaborate test scripts and the generating techniques using record and playback,as examples.For the former,it requires the tester's good ability to design test scripts scientifically and write it in specific specification.So it has a strong professional requirement.For the latter,although it takes a straightforward way to reduce the professional requirements of the testers,it also depends on repetitive work that testers need to interact with the application over and over again,because only one path is recorded in each execution.As a result,for the large and complex mobile application,it takes a lot of time and energy on doing repeated recordings because of the large amount of test executions.The entire test work has therefore become laborious and inefficient.Directing at the flaws,several typical automatic testing solutions have been put forward in academia over recent decades.Automatic testing focuses on automating the whole test process and exploring combinations of GUI events fully automatic.They automatically generate the corresponding test scripts based on the event traces.But this process is still less efficient,though it requires no human labours.Because for the real-world applications with multiple and complex interfaces,it holds fairly large triggering test events,so a huge number test scripts directly lead to the reduction to the testing execution efficiency.The whole automatic test process is very time consuming.In view of these characteristics,this article provides testers with a new test approach that can both reduce manpower costs and also improve test efficiency.In this paper,we present a sketch-guided GUI test generation approach for testing mobile applications.It provides a simple but expressive sketch language to help testers specify their testing purposes easily,and help testers fulfill their testing tasks efficiently.Testers just need to draw a few simple strokes on the corresponding graphical interface of the application under test.Then our approach recognizes these strokes automatically and converts it into the corresponding testing model.It also generates corresponding test cases based on this model and performs these scripts to complete the whole automation testing works easily and efficiently.In order to evaluate the true testing effects of our sketch-guided testing,we first designed and implemented a corresponding sketch-guided GUI testing system(SGGT).Then we select several typical existing solutions in the industry as a contrast,and design 3 comparative experiments to evaluate our approach on the 10 open source Android applications.And these applications have been used as the benchmark.The results show that our approach can improve testing effect significantly,achieve higher coverage and save test run time effectively with just 10-minute sketching for each application.