Automated GUI Testing Techniques for Android Applications

Mobile devices are integral parts of our daily lives; a little computer in our pocket has became a faithful assistant both for work than for amusement. The availability of mobile applications (commonly referred as apps) has made more and more useful bringing these devices with us everyday. The number of such applications in these years has faced a tremendous growth due to the market attractiveness; according to Forbes, by 2017 more than 270 billion mobile applications will be downloaded worldwide. The quality of a mobile application is a major concern for developers, users and application stores. According to a survey conducted by SmartBear from October to December 2013 nearly 50% of consumers will delete a mobile app if they encounter a bug. So, testing mobile applications to prevent the occurrence of software exceptions in production can be considered one of the key factor in uencing its quality together with the market response. As today, in literature many techniques have been presented aiming at testing mobile applications. In particular, many of them have been presented in the context of GUI Testing. The research activity described in this thesis is focused on proposing novel techniques and tools in the field of Automated GUI Testing for Mobile Applications. In particular, the work is targeted to the Android Operating System, that currently is the dominating operating system in the mobile devices market, although the results can be generalized to other mobile platforms

Toward Reverse Engineering of VBA Based Excel Spreadsheet Applications

Modern spreadsheet systems can be used to implement complex spreadsheet applications including data sheets, customized user forms and executable procedures written in a scripting language. These applications are often developed by practitioners that do not follow any software engineering practice and do not produce any design documentation. Thus, spreadsheet applications may be very difficult to be maintained or restructured. In this position paper we present in a nutshell two reverse engineering techniques and a tool that we are currently realizing for the abstraction of conceptual data models and business logic models.Comment: In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Software Engineering Methods in Spreadsheets (http://spreadsheetlab.org/sems15/

SVILUPPO DI UN SENSORE INNOVATIVO PER LA MISURA DEL CONTENUTO D’ACQUA DI TERRENI PARZIALMENTE SATURI

La nota presenta lo sviluppo e la calibrazione di un sistema innovativo per la misura del contenuto d’acqua in terreni parzialmente saturi, basato sulla spettroscopia d’impedenza. Tale tecnica, relativamente recente e poco comune in applicazioni geotecniche, permette di caratterizzare un campione di terreno a partire dalle sue proprietà elettriche, determinate applicando una tensione alternata e misurando l’intensità di corrente nel campione per valori di frequenza compresi nell’intervallo [500 Hz - 50 kHz]. L’impedenza del mezzo, dovuta sia alla resistenza opposta al passaggio di corrente sia alla reattanza, ovvero alla capacità di immagazzinare e cedere energia, dipende dal contenuto d’acqua del campione di terreno. La sperimentazione di laboratorio discussa in questa nota è volta a costruire una funzione di calibrazione del sistema di misura. I risultati preliminari mostrano un adeguato grado di ripetibilità delle misure e suggeriscono l’esistenza di una correlazione monotona tra il modulo dell’impedenza e il contenuto d’acqua gravimetrico

A Technique for Parallel GUI Testing of Android Applications

There is a large need for effective and efficient testing processes and tools for mobile applications, due to their continuous evolution and to the sensitivity of their users to failures. Industries and researchers focus their effort to the realization of effective fully automatic testing techniques for mobile applications. Many of the proposed testing techniques lack in efficiency because their algorithms cannot be executed in parallel. In particular, Active Learning testing techniques usually relay on sequential algorithms. In this paper we propose a Active Learning technique for the fully automatic exploration and testing of Android applications, that parallelizes and improves a general algorithm proposed in the literature. The novel parallel algorithm has been implemented in the context of a prototype tool exploiting a component-based architecture, and has been experimentally evaluated on 3 open source Android applications by varying different deployment configurations. The measured results have shown the feasibility of the proposed technique and an average saving in testing time between 33% (deploying two testing resources) and about 80% (deploying 12 testing resources)

A Technique for Parallel GUI Testing of Android Applications

Part 3: Testing Methods and ApplicationsInternational audienceThere is a large need for effective and efficient testing processes and tools for mobile applications, due to their continuous evolution and to the sensitivity of their users to failures. Industries and researchers focus their effort to the realization of effective fully automatic testing techniques for mobile applications. Many of the proposed testing techniques lack in efficiency because their algorithms cannot be executed in parallel. In particular, Active Learning testing techniques usually relay on sequential algorithms.In this paper we propose a Active Learning technique for the fully automatic exploration and testing of Android applications, that parallelizes and improves a general algorithm proposed in the literature. The novel parallel algorithm has been implemented in the context of a prototype tool exploiting a component-based architecture, and has been experimentally evaluated on 3 open source Android applications by varying different deployment configurations.The measured results have shown the feasibility of the proposed technique and an average saving in testing time between 33% (deploying two testing resources) and about 80% (deploying 12 testing resources)

AGRippin: a novel search based testing technique for Android applications

Recent studies have shown a remarkable need for testing automation techniques in the context of mobile applications. The main contributions in literature in the field of testing automation regard techniques such as Capture/Replay, Model Based, Model Learning and Random techniques. Unfortunately, only the last two typologies of techniques are applicable if no previous knowledge about the application under testing is available. Random techniques are able to generate effective test suites (in terms of source code coverage) but they need a remarkable effort in terms of machine time and the tests they generate are quite inefficient due to their redundancy. Model Learning techniques generate more efficient test suites but often they do not not reach good levels of coverage. In order to generate test suites that are both effective and efficient, we propose in this paper AGRippin, a novel Search Based Testing technique founded on the combination of genetic and hill climbing techniques. We carried out a case study involving five open source Android applications that has demonstrated how the proposed technique is able to generate test suites that are more effective and efficient than the ones generated by a Model Learning technique

A conceptual framework for the comparison of fully automated GUI testing techniques

Fully automated GUI testing techniques play an important role in the modern software development life cycles. These techniques are implemented by algorithms that automatically traverse the GUI by interacting with it, like robots discovering unexplored spaces. These algorithms are able to define and run test cases on the fly, while the application is in execution. Testing adequacy, performance or costs of such techniques may differ on the basis of different factors. In this paper we will propose an approach for comparing fully automated GUI testing techniques in a systematic manner. The approach is based on a generalized parametric algorithm that abstracts the key aspects of these techniques and provides a conceptual framework that can be used to define and compare different testing approaches. To validate the framework, we exploit it to compare the testing adequacy and the GUI models inferred by 9 fully automated testing techniques obtained by varying the configuration of the algorithm. The experiment is performed on a real Android application

Developing and Evaluating Objective Termination Criteria for Random Testing

Random testing is a software testing technique through which programs are tested by generating and executing random inputs. Because of its unstructured nature, it is difficult to determine when to stop a random testing process. Faults may be missed if the process is stopped prematurely, and resources may be wasted if the process is run too long. In this article, we propose two promising termination criteria, “All Equivalent” (AEQ) and “All Included in One” (AIO), applicable to random testing. These criteria stop random testing once the process has reached a code-coverage-based saturation point after which additional testing effort is unlikely to provide additional effectiveness. We model and implement them in the context of a general random testing process composed of independent random testing sessions. Thirty-six experiments involving GUI testing and unit testing of Java applications have demonstrated that the AEQ criteria is generally able to stop the process when a code coverage equal or very near to the saturation level is reached, while AIO is able to stop the process earlier in cases it reaches the saturation level of coverage. In addition, the performance of the two criteria has been compared against other termination criteria adopted in the literature