Android Testing Crawler

Abstract

Smartphones are becoming more important in our everyday lives and it is increasingly common to perform critical tasks on these devices, such as making payments. For this reason, ensuring the quality of these applications is an important task. One way to do this is through software testing. However, the testing of these applications presents major challenges due to the wide variety of devices available in the market. In this context, automated testing gains more relevance. There are dynamic test approaches for testing mobile applications, but there are some challenges that need to be overcome for good results, such as, being able to explore the complete behaviour of the application (e.g., overcoming blocking points); choosing appropriate input data; testing dynamic behaviour; testing specific characteristics of mobile applications, such as specific forms of interaction, e.g., long press, and so on. This paper presents a dynamic exploration approach of Android mobile applications that aims to overcome some of the problems identified. During the exploration process, the algorithm builds a Finite State Machine where states are traversed screens and transitions between states describe events that allow moving from one screen to another. This approach is implemented as an extension of the iMPAcT tool. The approach is validated over real Google Play apps and the test coverage results achieved are presented, compared and discussed.