Model-based Test Script Maintenance For Mobile Applications

With the rapid spread of mobile terminals,thousands of mobile applications have also been developed and used.They have brought great convenience to our work and life,and have gradually become an indispensable part of our daily life.But those appli-cations with poor quality also bring risks.Therefore it is necessary for users to choose applications with the most reliable quality.And the developers would pay more and more attention to the quality of their applications in order to make their own applica-tions stand out from the market.There are many ways to improve the quality of an application and testing is one of the most effective and commonly used methods.Mobile applications are typical event driven applications with rich GUIs,and are always updated frequently.Before new version is released,developers often perform regression testing on the application to ensure correct functionality,and GUI test scripts can help us to automatically reuse the regression testing process.Some test scripts may fail due to the frequent changes of applications.Once the new version of an applica-tion is released,it's necessary to maintain the test scripts with domain knowledges and expertise,or these test scripts will give some false positive results because of the errors of themselves.At present,the method of script maintenance used in the industry mainly relies on labor.However,mobile application are developed in short iterations and a few changes occur at each iteration.This results in a huge amount of maintenance work for reusing scripts.If test scripts are not reused,it is more costly to rebuild the test scripts.Cur-rently,there is less work to automate this maintenance process and requires a lot of manual intervention.Therefore,we propose a model-based method for automatically maintaining mobile application test scripts to minimize the cost of the maintenance process.The main contents of this thesis include the following aspects:1.We propose an approach to automatically extract GUI changes based on models of evolving mobile apps.We use existing modeling methods to extract the infor-mation for modeling,then we use the enhanced Event Sequence Model(ESM)to describe the behavior of mobile applications.Then we extract the GUI changes by comparing the two models of the two versions of an application.2.We give a method to maintain test scripts based on the changes of evolving mobile apps.By analyzing the test scripts of mobile apps,we map the test script to a path on the model.Finally,we maintain the test scripts based on the script maintenance action.3.Based on the implementation of the prototype tool called CH ATEM,we conducted an effective experiment to evaluate our approach.We picked out 16 production Android apps from the android market,and chose two versions for each app.In the experiment,our approach caught all the changes,and maintain all the test scripts affected by the changes.The result indicates that the reuse and maintenance are effective and practical.