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Primary supervisor

Chunyang Chen

A qualified Android application testing tool is a solid foundation for further tasks, such as crash detection and GUI collection. Like Monkey, Soat, Sapienz and Fastbot, current testing tools adopt a random dynamic exploration strategy, which means random events are generated and applied to current UIs on the phone screen. As mobile applications become larger and larger, traditional exploring methods become less and less efficient. Current testing tools repeatedly explore some common application interfaces, resulting in low interface coverage and too long exploration time.

 

We aim to propose a new guided exploration strategy for testing tools to replace current random exploration strategies. Toward that goal, we have finished a series of works in dynamic and static app exploration, including storyboard [1] and an empirical investigation of Android app accessibility [2]. We hope to explore more in this direction, including a new guided exploration strategy, developing a new exploring tool, etc.

 

[1] Chen, S., Fan, L., Chen, C., Su, T., Li, W., Liu, Y., & Xu, L. (2019, May). Storydroid: Automated generation of storyboard for Android apps. In 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (pp. 596-607). IEEE.

[2] Chen, S., Chen, C., Fan, L., Fan, M., Zhan, X., & Liu, Y. (2021). Accessible or Not An Empirical Investigation of Android App Accessibility. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

    Student cohort

    Double Semester

    Required knowledge

    Required knowledge

    • Strong programming background in Python or Java.
    • Basic understanding of recompile Android APK
    • Experience in static or dynamic code analysis will be a big plus.