Minimizing GUI event traces

Abstract

GUI input generation tools for Android apps, such as Android's Monkey, are useful for automatically producing test inputs, but these tests are generally orders of magnitude larger than necessary, making them difficult for humans to understand. We present a technique for minimizing the output of such tools. Our technique accounts for the non-deterministic behavior of mobile apps, producing small event traces that reach a desired activity with high probability. We propose a variant of delta debugging, augmented to handle non-determinism, to solve the problem of trace minimization. We evaluate our algorithm on two sets of commercial and open-source Android applications, showing that we can minimize large event traces reaching a particular application activity, producing traces that are, on average, less than 2% the size of the original traces.