Towards benchmarking the coverage of automated testing tools in Android against manual testing
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Publication Date
4-2024
Abstract
Android apps are commonly used nowadays as smartphones have become irreplaceable parts of modern lives. To ensure that these apps work correctly, developers would need to test them. Testing these apps is laborious, tedious, and often time consuming. Thus, many automated testing tools for Android have been proposed. These tools generate test cases that aim to achieve as much code coverage as possible. A lot of testing methodologies are employed such as model-based testing, search-based testing, random testing, fuzzing, concolic execution, and mutation. Despite much efforts, it is not perfectly clear how far these testing tools can cover user behaviours. To fill this gap, we want to measure the gap between the coverage of automated testing tools and manual testing. In this preliminary work, we selected a set of 11 Android apps and ran state-of-the-art automated testing tools on them. We also manually tested these apps by following a guideline on actions that we need to exhaust when exploring the apps. Our work highlights that automated tools need to close some gaps before they can achieve coverage that is comparable to manual testing. We also present some limitations that future automated tools need to overcome to achieve such coverage.
Discipline
Software Engineering
Research Areas
Software and Cyber-Physical Systems
Publication
MOBILESoft '24: Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 11th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems, Lisbon Portugal, April 14-15
First Page
74
Last Page
77
ISBN
9798400705946
Identifier
10.1145/3647632.3651394
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
New York
Citation
THUNG, Ferdian; IRSAN, Ivana Clairine; LIU, Jiakun; and LO, David.
Towards benchmarking the coverage of automated testing tools in Android against manual testing. (2024). MOBILESoft '24: Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 11th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems, Lisbon Portugal, April 14-15. 74-77.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/9266
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/3647632.3651394