Testing Android Incoming Calls

Abstract

Mobile applications are increasingly present in our daily lives. Being increasingly dependent on apps, we all want to make sure apps work as expected. One way to increase confidence and quality of software is through testing. However, the existing approaches and tools still do not provide sufficient solutions for testing mobile apps with features different from the ones found in desktop or web applications. In particular, there are guidelines that mobile developers should follow and that may be tested automatically but, as far as we know, there are no tools that are able do it. The iMPAcT tool combines exploration, reverse engineering and testing to check if mobile apps follow best practices to implement specific behavior called UI Patterns. Examples of UI Patterns within this catalog are: orientation, background-foreground, side drawer, tab-scroll, among others. For each of these behaviors (UI Patterns), the iMPAcT tool has a corresponding Test Pattern that checks if the UI Pattern implementation follows the guidelines. This paper presents an extension to iMPAcT tool. It enables to test if Android apps work properly after receiving an incoming call, i.e., if the state of the screen after the call is the same as before getting the call. It formalizes the problem, describes the overall approach, describes the architecture of the tool and reports an experiment performed over 61 public mobile apps.