Abstract
Context: Mobile applications support a set of user-interaction features that are inde- pendent of the application logic. Rotating the device, scrolling, or zooming are examples of such features. Some bugs in mobile applications can be attributed to user-interaction features. Objective: This paper proposes and evaluates a bug analyzer based on user- interaction features that uses digital image processing to find bugs. Method: Our bug analyzer detects bugs by comparing the similarity between images taken before and after a user-interaction. SURF, an interest point detector and descriptor, is used to compare the images. To evaluate the bug analyzer, we conducted a case study with 15 randomly selected mobile applications. First, we identified user-interaction bugs by manually testing the applications. Images were captured before and after applying each user-interaction feature. Then, image pairs were processed with SURF to obtain interest points, from which a similarity percentage was computed, to finally decide whether there was a bug. Results: We performed a total of 49 user-interaction feature tests. When manually testing the applications, 17 bugs were found, whereas when using image processing, 15 bugs were detected. Conclusions: 8 out of 15 mobile applications tested had bugs associated to user-interaction features. Our bug analyzer based on image processing was able to detect 88% (15 out of 17) of the user-interaction bugs found with manual testing.
Highlights
The variety of mobile devices and their operating systems, known as fragmentation [1, 2, 3, 4], represents a testing challenge nowadays since mobile applications may behave differently regarding usability and performance depending on the device they are run on
It is very important to clarify that we reported these bugs based on the definition and behavior expected from the user-interaction features
We have proposed and evaluated a bug analyzer based on user-interaction features to detect bugs in mobile applications for the Android platform
Summary
The variety of mobile devices and their operating systems, known as fragmentation [1, 2, 3, 4], represents a testing challenge nowadays since mobile applications may behave differently regarding usability and performance depending on the device they are run on. According to Amalfitano and Fasolino [9], the quality of mobile applications is lower than expected due to rapid development processes where the activity of software testing is neglected or carried out superficially. Zaeem et al [10] conducted a study of defects in mobile applications, where they found that a significant fraction of bugs can be attributed to a class of features called user-interaction. They define a user-interaction feature as: An action supported by the mobile platform, which enables a human user to interact with a mobile app, using the mobile device and the graphical user-interface (GUI) of the app.
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