Mobile developers face unique challenges when detecting and reporting crashes
in apps due to their prevailing GUI event-driven nature and additional sources
of inputs (e.g., sensor readings). To support developers in these tasks, we
introduce a novel, automated approach called CRASHSCOPE. This tool explores a
given Android app using systematic input generation, according to several
strategies informed by static and dynamic analyses, with the intrinsic goal of
triggering crashes. When a crash is detected, CRASHSCOPE generates an augmented
crash report containing screenshots, detailed crash reproduction steps, the
captured exception stack trace, and a fully replayable script that
automatically reproduces the crash on a target device(s). We evaluated
CRASHSCOPE's effectiveness in discovering crashes as compared to five
state-of-the-art Android input generation tools on 61 applications. The results
demonstrate that CRASHSCOPE performs about as well as current tools for
detecting crashes and provides more detailed fault information. Additionally,
in a study analyzing eight real-world Android app crashes, we found that
CRASHSCOPE's reports are easily readable and allow for reliable reproduction of
crashes by presenting more explicit information than human written reports.Comment: 12 pages, in Proceedings of 9th IEEE International Conference on
Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST'16), Chicago, IL, April
10-15, 2016, pp. 33-4