Facilitating Reusable and Scalable Automated Testing and Analysis for Android Apps

Abstract

Mobile apps are prevalent in everyone's daily life. However, apps are oftentimes defective, undermining their convenience, and therefore automated testing and analysis of apps are developed to enhance apps' quality. As these advanced technologies become increasingly effective and complicated, prototyping such a tool also becomes a challenge. To facilitate easy development of high-quality testing and analysis tools that work with real-world apps, we in this paper present the design and implementation of ATT (Android Testing Toolkit), for crafting reusable and scalable testing and analysis on Android apps. ATT consists of integrated tools and APIs for event generation, profiling and program instrumentation, and can be distributed over cloud platforms for scalable testing and analysis. We qualitatively evaluated the applicability of ATT by demonstrating implementation of a series of existing and enhanced work (RERAN, Monkey+ and UGA) upon ATT, and quantitatively studied the scalability of parallelized UGA on a cloud platform with five real-world apps. We believe that our ATT tool would facilitate development of more advanced testing and analysis approaches for Android apps.