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Mobolic: An automated approach to exercising mobile application GUIs using symbiosis of online testing technique and customated input generation
Author(s) -
Arnatovich Yauhen Leanidavich,
Wang Lipo,
Ngo Ngoc Minh,
Soh Charlie
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.2564
Subject(s) - computer science , android (operating system) , graphical user interface testing , graphical user interface , embedded system , mobile apps , human–computer interaction , mobile device , open source , user interface , real time computing , operating system , software , user interface design , world wide web
Summary The increasingly prevalent use of mobile devices has raised the popularity of mobile applications. Therefore, automated testing of mobile applications has become an extremely important task. However, it is still a challenge to automatically generate tests with high coverage for mobile applications due to their specific nontrivial structure and the highly interactive nature of graphical user interfaces (GUIs). In this paper, we propose a novel automated GUI testing technique for mobile applications, namely, Mobolic . In this approach, tests with high coverage are automatically generated and executed by combining the online testing technique and customated input generation. Employing the online testing technique, Mobolic systematically explores the app GUI without falling in a loop. It generates relevant events “on the fly” that are followed by an immediate execution. In addition, involving the customated input generation, Mobolic automatically generates relevant user inputs such as user‐predefined, concrete, or random ones. We implemented Mobolic and evaluated its performance on 10 real‐world open‐source Android applications. Our experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of Mobolic in terms of achieved code coverage and overall exercising time.