Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
1-2026
Abstract
GUI test migration aims to produce test cases with events and assertions to test specific functionalities of a target app. Existing migration approaches typically focus on the widget-mapping paradigm that maps widgets from source apps to target apps. However, since different apps may implement the same functionality in different ways, direct mapping may result in incomplete or buggy test cases, thus significantly impacting the effectiveness of testing the target functionality and the practical applicability of migration approaches.In this article, we propose a new migration paradigm (i.e., the abstraction-concretization paradigm) that first abstracts the test logic for the target functionality and then utilizes this logic to generate the concrete GUI test case. Furthermore, we introduce MACdroid, the first approach that migrates GUI test cases based on this paradigm. Specifically, we propose an abstraction technique that utilizes source test cases from source apps targeting the same functionality to extract a general test logic for that functionality. Then, we propose a concretization technique that utilizes the general test logic to guide an LLM in generating the corresponding GUI test case (including events and assertions) for the target app. We evaluate MACdroid on two widely used datasets (including 31 apps, 34 functionalities, and 123 test cases). On the FrUITeR dataset, the test cases generated by MACdroid successfully test 64% of the target functionalities, improving the baselines by 191%. On the Lin dataset, MACdroid successfully tests 75% of the target functionalities, outperforming the baselines by 42%. These results underscore the effectiveness of MACdroid in GUI test migration.
Keywords
Test migration, Functional GUI testing, Large language model, software testing and debugging
Discipline
Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces | Software Engineering
Publication
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Volume
35
Issue
2
First Page
1
Last Page
29
ISSN
1049-331X
Identifier
10.1145/3726525
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
ZHANG, Yakun; LIU, Chen; XIE, Xiaofei; LIN, Yun; DONG, Jin Song; HAO, Dan; and ZHANG, Lu.
GUI test migration via abstraction and concretization. (2026). ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. 35, (2), 1-29.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/10956
Copyright Owner and License
Authors-CC-BY
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/3726525