Responsiveness analysis tool for Android application

Abstract

Responsiveness is an important type of quality factor in Android application because it directly affects user experience. When the user interface thread performs lengthy operations, the user may feel that the application has become sluggish or frozen. This may lead to a negative user experience, poor review, and loss in market success. This paper proposes a static responsiveness analysis tool for Android applications to find potentially poor responsiveness defects which are difficult to detect by conventional testing methods as they are sensitive to the user environment. This tool finds responsiveness defects by discovering operations invoked in the user interface thread that may block the execution of other operations. We collect these operations according to Android developer guideline and previous related work. The proposed tool successfully found 45 potential responsiveness defects in seven open source Android applications.