Empirical study of Android test generation tools on an industrial app
Deng‐Feng Li · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2017
Given the ever increasing number of research tools to automatically generate inputs to test Android applications (or simply apps), researchers recently asked the question “Are we there yet?” (in terms of the practicality of the tools). In particular, researchers conduct an empirical study on existing testing techniques and tools on open-source Android apps. In this thesis, we present two significant extensions of that study. First, we conduct the first industrial case study of applying existing available testing tools against WeChat, a popular messenger app with over 800 million monthly active users. Second, we study the characteristics of covered activities achieved by testing tools to show which tools can be used in combination with other tools to achieve an optimal activity coverage. We also study the reasons why some activities are covered by only a particular testing tool to help app or tool developers improve their testing tools. Furthermore, we manually categorize not-covered activities to provide insightful information about the not-covered code entities. Such categorization will motivate app developers to spend additional resources during their testing efforts to cover such activities.