Record and replay for android: Are we there yet in industrial cases?

Wing Lam, Zhengkai Wu, Dengfeng Li, Wenyu Wang, Haibing Zheng, Hui Luo, Peng Yan, Yuetang Deng, Tao Xie

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Mobile applications, or apps for short, are gaining popularity. The input sources (e.g., touchscreen, sensors, transmitters) of the smart devices that host these apps enable the apps to offer a rich experience to the users, but these input sources pose testing complications to the developers (e.g., writing tests to accurately utilize multiple input sources together and be able to replay such tests at a later time). To alleviate these complications, researchers and practitioners in recent years have developed a variety of record-and-replay tools to support the testing expressiveness of smart devices. These tools allow developers to easily record and automate the replay of complicated usage scenarios of their app. Due to Android's large share of the smart-device market, numerous record-and-replay tools have been developed using a variety of techniques to test Android apps. To better understand the strengths and weaknesses of these tools, we present a comparison of popular record-and-replay tools from researchers and practitioners, by applying these tools to test three popular industrial apps downloaded from the Google Play store. Our comparison is based on three main metrics: (1) ability to reproduce common usage scenarios, (2) space overhead of traces created by the tools, and (3) robustness of traces created by the tools (when being replayed on devices with different resolutions). The results from our comparison show which record-and-replay tools may be the best for developers and identify future directions for improving these tools to better address testing complications of smart devices.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationESEC/FSE 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
EditorsAndrea Zisman, Eric Bodden, Wilhelm Schafer, Arie van Deursen
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages854-859
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781450351058
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 21 2017
Event11th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2017 - Paderborn, Germany
Duration: Sep 4 2017Sep 8 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
VolumePart F130154

Other

Other11th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2017
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityPaderborn
Period9/4/179/8/17

Keywords

  • Android
  • GUI testing
  • Record-and-replay

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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