ConfigDroid: Configuration-aware GUI testing of Android Applications

Abstract

Android applications (a.k.a., Android apps) have developed rapidly in the last decade, and have become an indispensable part in people's lives. However, it is challenging to guarantee their quality and reliability. The prevalence and severity of Android apps issues have driven the design and development of a number of detection and testing techniques. However, these techniques mainly target the generation of test sequences using GUI events in the applications, lacking of attentions to complex Android system configurations. In this paper, we conducted an in-depth study on real-world Android bugs related with configurations from 20 open-source popular Android applications, to help understand the characteristics of these bugs. We find the majority of configurations-related Android bugs would lead to catastrophic consequences, e.g., crash and hang. Based on the study, we design and implement ConfigDroid, a tool for configuration-aware GUI testing of Android applications. We use 10 open-source popular Android applications to evaluate the effectiveness. The result shows that, ConfigDroid can detect 4 more unique configuration-related crashes than state-of-the-art tools, Monkey and Stoat.