Exploiting the Saturation Effect in Automatic Random Testing of Android Applications

Abstract

Monkey Fuzz Testing (MFT), a form of random testing, continues to gain popularity to test Android apps because of its ease of use. (Untrained) programmers use MFT tools to fully automatically detect certain classes of faults in apps. A challenge for these tools is the lack of a stopping criterion -- programmers currently typically stop these tools when they run out of time. In this paper, we use the notion of the Saturation Effect of an MFT tool on an app under test to define a stopping criterion, parameterized by the app's preconditions and the tool's configurations. We have implemented our approach in the Android Ripper MFT tool. We experimentally report results on 18 real Android app subjects. We show that the saturation effect is able to stop testing when test adequacy has been achieved without wasting test cycles.