Source-Codeless Testing for Android Apps

Abstract

Most of the automated approaches to support software engineering tasks for mobile applications, use source code as entry, which due to privacy factors imposes hard constraints on the implementation of those approaches by third-party services. However, the continuous pressure from market is leading practitioners to crowdsource/outsource software engineering tasks to third-parties that provide on-the-cloud infrastructures. Therefore, approaches that work at closed-source level (i.e., do not require source code) are desirable to enable automated outsourced software engineering tasks by third-party services. Specifically, in this paper we focus on testing since is a task that has broadly accepted approaches at source-code level, but new efforts are required to enable source-codeless approaches. We analyzed the current challenges and shortfalls of the currently proposed approaches that works at source code and APK level, and present our research plan oriented to reduce the existing gap for enabling testing techniques at APK level.