Apps' pervasive role in our society led to the definition of test automation approaches to ensure their dependability. However, state-of-the-art approaches tend to generate large numbers of test inputs and are unlikely to achieve more than 50% method coverage. In this paper, we propose a strategy to achieve significantly higher coverage of the code affected by updates with a much smaller number of test inputs, thus alleviating the test oracle problem. More specifically, we present ATUA, a model-based approach that synthesizes App models with static analysis, integrates a dynamically-refined state abstraction function and combines complementary testing strategies, including (1) coverage of the model structure, (2) coverage of the App code, (3) random exploration, and (4) coverage of dependencies identified through information retrieval. Its model-based strategy enables ATUA to generate a small set of inputs that exercise only the code affected by the updates. In turn, this makes common test oracle solutions more cost-effective as they tend to involve human effort. A large empirical evaluation, conducted with 72 App versions belonging to nine popular Android Apps, has shown that ATUA is more effective and less effort intensive than state-of-the-art approaches when testing App updates.
The Android operating system is frequently updated, with each version bringing a new set of APIs. New versions may involve API deprecation; Android apps using deprecated APIs need to be updated to ensure the apps' compatibility withold and new versions of Android. Updating deprecated APIs is a time-consuming endeavor. Hence, automating the updates of Android APIs can be beneficial for developers. CocciEvolve is the state-of-the-art approach for this automation. However, it has several limitations, including its inability to resolve out-of-method-boundary variables and the low code readability …
Android operating system (OS) is often updated, where each new version may involve API deprecation. Usages of deprecated APIs in Android apps need to be updated to ensure the apps' compatibility with the old and new versions of Android OS. In this work, we propose AndroEvolve, an automated tool to update usages of deprecated Android APIs, that addresses the limitations of the state-of-the-art tool, CocciEvolve. AndroEvolve utilizes data flow analysis to solve the problem of out-of-method-boundary variables, and variable denormalization to remove the temporary variables introduced by CocciEvolv…
Many phone vendors use Android as their underlying OS, but often extend it to add new functionality and to make it compatible with their specific phones. When a new version of Android is released, phone vendors need to merge or re-apply their customizations and changes to the new release. This is a difficult and time-consuming process, which often leads to late adoption of new versions. In this paper, we perform an empirical study to understand the nature of changes that phone vendors make, versus changes made in the original development of Android. By investigating the overlap of different ch…
Modern distributed applications are moving toward a microservice architecture, in which each service is developed and managed independently, and new features and updates are delivered continuously. A guiding principle of microservice architecture is that it must be built to anticipate and mitigate a variety of hardware and software failures. In order to test the fault handling capabilities of microservces, this paper presents IntelliFT, a feedback-based, automated failure testing technique for microservice based applications, which aims to expose the defects in the fault-handling logic quickly…
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth（马萨诸塞大学达特茅斯分校）
Although there are many automated software testing suites, they usually focus on unit, system, and interface testing. However, especially software updates such as new security features have the potential to diminish user experience. In this paper, we propose a novel automated user experience testing methodology that learns how code changes impact the time unit and system tests take, and extrapolate user experience changes based on this information. Such a tool can be integrated into existing continuous integration pipelines, and it provides software teams immediate user experience feedback. We…
Embedded systems are ubiquitous and play critical roles in management systems for industry and transport. Software failures in these domains may lead to loss of production or even loss of life, so the software in these systems needs to be reliable. Software testing is a standard approach for quality assurance of embedded software, and many software development processes strive for test automation. Out of the many challenges for successful software test automation, this thesis addresses five: (i) understanding how updated software reaches a test environment, how testing is conducted in the test…
Research software is often developed by individual researchers or small teams in parallel to their research work. The more people and research projects rely on the software in question, the more important it is that software updates implement new features correctly and do not introduce regressions. Thus, developers of research software must balance their limited resources between implementing new features and thoroughly testing any code changes. We present the processes we use for developing the distributed integration framework RCE at DLR. These processes aim to strike a balance between autom…
Android Apps are frequently updated, every couple of weeks, to keep up with changing user, hardware and business demands. Correctness of App updates is checked through extensive testing. Recent research has proposed tools for automated GUI event generation in Android Apps. These techniques, however, are not efficient at checking App updates as the generated GUI events do not prioritise updates, and instead explore other App behaviours. We address this need in this paper with CAT (Change-focused Android GUI Testing). For App updates, at the source code or GUI level, CAT performs change impact a…
