ω\omegaTest: WebView-Oriented Testing for Android Applications

WebView is a UI widget that helps integrate web applications into the native context of Android apps. It provides powerful mechanisms for bi-directional interactions between the native-end (Java) and the web-end (JavaScript) of an Android app. However, these interaction mechanisms are complicated and have induced various types of bugs. To mitigate the problem, various techniques have been proposed to detect WebView-induced bugs via dynamic analysis, which heavily relies on executing tests to explore WebView behaviors. Unfortunately, these techniques either require manual effort or adopt random test generation approaches, which are not able to effectively explore diverse WebView behaviors. In this paper, we study the problem of test generation for WebViews in Android apps. Effective test generation for WebViews requires identifying the essential program properties to be covered by the generated tests. To this end, we propose WebView-specific properties to characterize WebView behaviors, and devise a cross-language dynamic analysis method to identify these properties. We develop $\omega$Test, a test generation technique that searches for event sequences covering the identified WebView-specific properties. An evaluation on 74 real-world open-/closed-source Android apps shows that $\omega$Test can cover diverse WebView behaviors and detect WebView-induced bugs effectively. $\omega$Test detected 36 previously-unknown bugs. From the 22 bugs that we have reported to the app developers, 13 bugs were confirmed, 9 of which were fixed.Comment: Accepted by the 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2023

Testing Graphical User Interfaces with Property-Based Testing

Before a software product is released, it has to be verified that the product works as it should. Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) need to be tested like any other software products. The purpose of testing GUIs is to detect defects but also unexpected behaviour of a GUI. In 2000 John Hughes and Koen Claessen introduced a new software testing technique: \textit{Property-Based Testing} (PBT). In this testing technique the functionality of the system under the test is defined as properties. Properties are like rules for the features under test. A property defines a relation between input and output that should always hold for all inputs. A property is tested by generating a large number of inputs for which the property is tested. The goal of this thesis is to explore if PBT is applicable to UI testing. We formulate properties that describe the rules that a GUI should follow, then apply PBT and investigate whether defects could be exposed this way. We also explore whether PBT solves any of the challenges of UI testing, in particular whether test coverage can be increased by using PBT. As its results, this thesis shows that PBT can be applied in GUI testing and that there are defect classes that might not be detectable by traditional testing methods, but can be found using PBT

Simplicity-oriented lifelong learning of web applications

Nowadays, web applications are ubiquitous. Entire business models revolve around making their services available over the Internet, anytime, anywhere in the world. Due to today’s rapid development practices, software changes are released faster than ever before, creating the risk of losing control over the quality of the delivered products. To counter this, appropriate testing methodologies must be deeply integrated into each phase of the development cycle to identify potential defects as early as possible and to ensure that the product operates as expected in production. The use of low- and no-code tools and code generation technologies can drastically reduce the implementation effort by using well-tailored (graphical) Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) to focus on what is important: the product. DSLs and corresponding Integrated Modeling Environments (IMEs) are a key enabler for quality control because many system properties can already be verified at a pre-product level. However, to verify that the product fulfills given functional requirements at runtime, end-to-end testing is still a necessity. This dissertation describes the implementation of a lifelong learning framework for the continuous quality control of web applications. In this framework, models representing user-level behavior are mined from running systems using active automata learning, and system properties are verified using model checking. All this is achieved in a continuous and fully automated manner. Code changes trigger testing, learning, and verification processes which generate feedback that can be used for model refinement or product improvement. The main focus of this framework is simplicity. On the one hand, it allows Quality Assurance (QA) engineers to apply learning-based testing techniques to web applications with minimal effort, even without writing code; on the other hand, it allows automation engineers to easily implement these techniques in modern development workflows driven by Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD). The effectiveness of this framework is leveraged by the Language-Driven Engineering (LDE) approach to web development. Key to this is the text-based DSL iHTML, which enables the instrumentation of user interfaces to make web applications learnable by design, i.e., they adhere to practices that allow fully automated inference of behavioral models without prior specification of an input alphabet. By designing code generators to generate instrumented web-based products, the effort for quality control in the LDE ecosystem is minimized and reduced to formulating runtime properties in temporal logic and verifying them against learned models

The perspective of students on drivers and benefits of building information modelling incorporation into quantity surveying profession in Klang Valley Malaysia

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a very useful tool that facilitates architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) professionals and stakeholders in planning, designing and constructing the buildings through 3D models. BIM can be widened to building operations and data storage which can be accessible by owners and others. Such data help owners and stakeholders to generate results according to the information gained through BIM models. The objectives of this study were to identify the perspective of students on drivers of BIM incorporation into the quantity surveying profession and to identify the perspective of students on benefits of BIM incorporation into the quantity surveying profession. A questionnaire survey was carried out to gain the students’ perspective on drivers and benefits of BIM incorporation into the quantity surveying profession in Klang Valley, Malaysia. Specifically, this study investigated twelve drivers and fourteen benefits of BIM incorporation into the quantity surveying profession. The top three drivers were improving the capacity to provide whole-life value to the client, desire for innovation to remain competitive and strong support from university management and industry. The top three benefits were BIM provides fast, effective and efficient quantity take-off and cost estimation, time savings in the preparation of estimating cost and improved visualization for better understanding of designs for measurement and minimise omissions. For future research, it is recommended that the study be replicated at other regions so that a clearer view of this topic can be obtained. Besides, qualitative research methods could be used in identifying other drivers and benefits not covered in this study. By answering the questions in the survey form, the students were able to gain some knowledge on BIM and its importance to the quantity surveying profession. Also, it would be interesting to include industrial practitioners in this kind of study, allowing comparisons of the results between academia and industry at a later stage. Nonetheless, this study benefited the undergraduate students pursuing the Bachelor of Science (Hons) Quantity Surveying programme, universities, colleges and other institutions that offered the quantity surveying programmes at various levels and quantity surveyors working in the construction industry by exposing them to a comprehensive list of drivers and benefits of BIM incorporation into quantity surveying profession. In a way, this study helped promoted BIM and its implementation in the field of quantity surveying in Klang Valley, Malaysia