Resource leak bugs in Android apps are pervasive and can cause serious performance degradation and system crashes. In recent years, several resource leak detection techniques have been proposed to assist Android developers in correctly managing system resources. Yet, there exist no common bug benchmarks for effectively and reliably comparing such techniques and quantitatively evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. This paper describes our initial contribution towards constructing such a benchmark. To locate real resource leak bugs, we mined 124,215 code revisions of 34 large-scale open-source Android apps. We successfully found 298 fixed resource leaks, which cover a diverse set of resource classes, from 32 out of the 34 apps. To understand the characteristics of these bugs, we conducted an empirical study, which revealed the root causes of frequent resource leaks in Android apps and common patterns of faults made by developers. With our findings, we further implemented a static checker to detect a common pattern of resource leaks in Android apps. Experiments showed that the checker can effectively locate real resource leaks in popular Android apps, confirming the usefulness of our work.
Android apps are GUI-based event-driven software and have become ubiquitous in recent years. Obviously, functional correctness is critical for an app's success. However, in addition to crash bugs, non-crashing functional bugs (in short as "non-crashing bugs" in this work) like inadvertent function failures, silent user data lost and incorrect display information are prevalent, even in popular, well-tested apps. These non-crashing functional bugs are usually caused by program logic errors and manifest themselves on the graphic user interfaces (GUIs). In practice, such bugs pose significant chal…
The functionality of many mobile applications is dependent on various contextual, external factors. Depending on unforeseen scenarios, mobile apps can even malfunction or crash. In this paper, we have introduced MobiCoMonkey - automated tool that allows a developer to test app against custom or auto generated contextual scenarios and help detect possible bugs through the emulator. Moreover, it reports the connection between the bugs and contextual factors so that the bugs can later be reproduced. It utilizes the tools offered by Android SDK and logcat to inject events and capture traces of the…
Spotting Setting-Related UI Display Bugs in Android Apps
School of Informatics (National Characteristic Demonstration Software School), Xiamen University（厦门大学信息学院（国家示范性软件学院））；Fujian Engineering Research Center of High-Performance Intelligent Computing Systems（福建省高性能智能计算系统工程研究中心）
Android apps must be able to deal with both stop events, which require immediately stopping the execution of the app without losing state information, and start events, which require resuming the execution of the app at the same point it was stopped. Support to these kinds of events must be explicitly implemented by developers who unfortunately often fail to implement the proper logic for saving and restoring the state of an app. As a consequence apps can lose data when moved to background and then back to foreground (e.g., to answer a call) or when the screen is simply rotated. These faults c…
The Android platform introduces the runtime permission model in version 6.0. The new model greatly improves data privacy and user experience, but brings new challenges for app developers. First, it allows users to freely revoke granted permissions. Hence, developers cannot assume that the permissions granted to an app would keep being granted. Instead, they should make their apps carefully check the permission status before invoking dangerous APIs. Second, the permission specification keeps evolving, bringing new types of compatibility issues into the ecosystem. To understand the impact of the…
Many software bugs are reported manually, particularly bugs that manifest themselves visually in the user interface. End-users typically report these bugs via app reviewing websites, issue trackers, or in-app built-in bug reporting tools, if available. While these systems have various features that facilitate bug reporting (e.g., textual templates or forms), they often provide limited guidance, concrete feedback, or quality verification to end-users, who are often inexperienced at reporting bugs and submit low-quality bug reports that lead to excessive developer effort in bug report management…
Android apps must work correctly even if their execution is interrupted by external events. For instance, an app must work properly even if a phone call is received, or after its layout is redrawn because the smartphone has been rotated. Since these events may require destroying, when the execution is interrupted, and recreating, when the execution is resumed, the foreground activity of the app, the only way to prevent the loss of state information is saving and restoring it. This behavior must be explicitly implemented by app developers, who often miss to implement it properly, releasing apps…
The modern software development landscape has seen a shift in focus toward mobile applications as tablets and smartphones near ubiquitous adoption. Due to this trend, the complexity of these apps has been increasing, making development and maintenance challenging. Additionally, current bug tracking systems are not able to effectively support construction of reports with actionable information that directly lead to a bug's resolution. To address the need for an improved reporting system, we introduce a novel solution, called FUSION, that helps users auto complete reproduction steps in bug repor…
This paper introduces BURT, a web-based chatbot for interactive reporting of Android app bugs. BURT is designed to assist Android app end-users in reporting high-quality defect information using an interactive interface. BURT guides the users in reporting essential bug report elements, i.e., the observed behavior, expected behavior, and the steps to reproduce the bug. It verifies the quality of the text written by the user and provides instant feedback. In addition, BURT provides graphical suggestions that the users can choose as alternatives to textual descriptions. We empirically evaluated B…
Bugs that surface in mobile applications can be difficult to reproduce and fix due to several confounding factors including the highly GUI-driven nature of mobile apps, varying contextual states, differing platform versions and device fragmentation. It is clear that developers need support in the form of automated tools that allow for more precise reporting of application defects in order to facilitate more efficient and effective bug fixes. In this paper, we present a tool aimed at supporting application testers and developers in the process of On-Device Bug Reporting. Our tool, called ODBR, …
One of the challenges of analyzing, testing and debugging Android apps is that the potential execution orders of callbacks are missing from the apps' source code. However, bugs, vulnerabilities and refactoring transformations have been found to be related to callback sequences. Existing work on control flow analysis of Android apps have mainly focused on analyzing GUI events. GUI events, although being a key part of determining control flow of Android apps, do not offer a complete picture. Our observation is that orthogonal to GUI events, the Android API calls also play an important role in de…
As the popularity of mobile smart devices continues to climb the complexity of "apps" continues to increase, making the development and maintenance process challenging. Current bug tracking systems lack key features to effectively support construction of reports with actionable information that directly lead to a bug's resolution. In this demo we present the implementation of a novel bug reporting system, called Fusion, that facilitates users including reproduction steps in bug reports for mobile apps. Fusion links user-provided information to program artifacts extracted through static and dyn…
Many automated program repair techniques have been proposed for fixing bugs. Some of these techniques use the information beyond the given buggy program and test suite to improve the quality of generated patches. However, there are several limitations that hinder the wide adoption of these techniques, including (1) they rely on a fixed set of repair templates for patch generation or reference implementation, (2) searching for the suitable reference implementation is challenging, (3) generated patches are not explainable. Meanwhile, a recent approach shows that similar bugs exist across differe…
One of the key tasks related to ensuring mobile app quality is the reporting, management, and resolution of bug reports. As such, researchers have committed considerable resources toward automating various tasks of the bug management process for mobile apps, such as reproduction and triaging. However, the success of these automated approaches is largely dictated by the characteristics and properties of the bug reports they operate upon. As such, understanding mobile app bug reports is imperative to drive the continued advancement of report management techniques. While prior studies have examin…
App quality has been shown to be the most important indicator of app adoption. To assure quality, developers mainly use testing to find bugs in app and apply structural and GUI test coverage criteria. However, mobile apps have more behaviors than the GUI actions, e.g. an app also handles events from sensors and executes long-running background tasks through Android API calls to Services and AsyncTasks. Our studies found that there are important app behaviors via callback interactions that should be covered in testing, as data sharing between callbacks is common and is the cause of many existin…
Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world, running on more than 70% of mobile devices. This implies a gigantic and very competitive market for Android apps. Being successful in such a market is far from trivial and requires, besides the tackling of a problem or need felt by a vast audience, the development of high-quality apps. As recently showed in the literature, connectivity issues (e.g., mishandling of zero/unreliable Internet connection) can result in bugs and/or crashes, negatively affecting the app's user experience. While these issues have been studied in the lit…
Bug reports are vital for software maintenance that allow users to inform developers of the problems encountered while using software. However, it is difficult for non-technical users to write clear descriptions about the bug occurrence. Therefore, more and more users begin to record the screen for reporting bugs as it is easy to be created and contains detailed procedures triggering the bug. But it is still tedious and time-consuming for developers to reproduce the bug due to the length and unclear actions within the recording. To overcome these issues, we propose GIFdroid, a light-weight app…
Android has been the most popular smartphone system, with multiple platform versions (e.g., KITKAT and Lollipop) active in the market. To manage the application's compatibility with one or more platform versions, Android allows apps to declare the supported platform SDK versions in their manifest files. In this paper, we make a first effort to study this modern software mechanism. Our objective is to measure the current practice of the declared SDK versions (which we term as DSDK versions afterwards) in real apps, and the consistency between the DSDK versions and their app API calls. To this e…
Mobile apps have become indispensable for daily life, not only for individuals but also for companies/organizations that offer their services digitally. Inherited by the mobility of devices, there are no limitations regarding the locations or conditions in which apps are being used. For example, apps can be used where no internet connection is available. Therefore, offline-first is a highly desired quality of mobile apps. Accordingly, inappropriate handling of connectivity issues and miss-implementation of good practices lead to bugs and crashes occurrences that reduce the confidence of users …
Never before has any OS been so popular as Android. Existing mobile phones are not simply devices for making phone calls and receiving SMS messages, but powerful communication and entertainment platforms for web surfing, social networking, etc. Even though the Android OS offers powerful communication and application execution capabilities, it is riddled with defects (e.g., security risks, and compatibility issues), new vulnerabilities come to light daily, and bugs cost the economy tens of billions of dollars annually. For example, malicious apps (e.g., back-doors, fraud apps, ransomware, spywa…
Software testing is an important phase in the software development life-cycle because it helps in identifying bugs in a software system before it is shipped into the hand of its end users. There are numerous studies on how developers test general-purpose software applications. The idiosyncrasies of mobile software applications, however, set mobile apps apart from general-purpose systems (e.g., desktop, stand-alone applications, web services). This paper investigates working habits and challenges of mobile software developers with respect to testing. A key finding of our exhaustive study, using…
