One Sentence Can Kill the Bug: Auto-Replay Mobile App Crashes From One-Sentence Overviews

IF 6.5 1区计算机科学 Q1 COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Pub Date : 2025-02-03 DOI:10.1109/TSE.2025.3535938

Yuchao Huang;Junjie Wang;Zhe Liu;Mingyang Li;Song Wang;Chunyang Chen;Yuanzhe Hu;Qing Wang

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Crash reports play a crucial role in software maintenance as they inform developers about the issues encountered in mobile applications. Developers must reproduce the reported crash before fixing it, which is extremely time-consuming and tedious. Existing studies have focused on automatic crash reproduction with step-by-step instructions. However, a non-neglectable portion of crash reports only provides a one-sentence overview, which merely describes the final crash-triggering action. These reports require developers to invest more effort in understanding and fixing the issues while existing techniques cannot handle them due to the lack of step-by-step guidance, thus calling for a greater need for automatic support. Leveraging the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in combining acting and reasoning, we propose ReActDroid, an automated approach to reproduce mobile application crashes directly from the crash overview. ReActDroid utilizes ReAct prompting to augment the app-specific knowledge and exploration history, enabling the LLM to derive the necessary steps for triggering the crash from a comprehensive and historical perspective. We evaluate ReActDroid on 102 crash reports from 69 popular Android apps and successfully reproduce 57.8% of the crashes, surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art baselines by 69% to 321%. Besides, the average reproducing time is 51.8 seconds, outperforming the baselines by 73% to 949%. We also evaluate the usefulness of ReActDroid with promising results.

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来源期刊

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 工程技术-工程：电子与电气

CiteScore

9.70

自引率

10.80%

发文量

724

审稿时长

6 months

期刊介绍： IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering seeks contributions comprising well-defined theoretical results and empirical studies with potential impacts on software construction, analysis, or management. The scope of this Transactions extends from fundamental mechanisms to the development of principles and their application in specific environments. Specific topic areas include: a) Development and maintenance methods and models: Techniques and principles for specifying, designing, and implementing software systems, encompassing notations and process models. b) Assessment methods: Software tests, validation, reliability models, test and diagnosis procedures, software redundancy, design for error control, and measurements and evaluation of process and product aspects. c) Software project management: Productivity factors, cost models, schedule and organizational issues, and standards. d) Tools and environments: Specific tools, integrated tool environments, associated architectures, databases, and parallel and distributed processing issues. e) System issues: Hardware-software trade-offs. f) State-of-the-art surveys: Syntheses and comprehensive reviews of the historical development within specific areas of interest.