Reproducing Context-Sensitive Crashes of Mobile Apps Using Crowdsourced Monitoring

Abstract

While the number of mobile apps published by app stores keeps on increasing, the quality of these apps varies widely. Unfortunately, for many apps, end-users continue experiencing bugs and crashes once installed on their mobile device. Crashes are annoying for end-users, but they denitely are for app developers who need to reproduce the crashes as fast as possible beforefinding the root cause of the reported issues. Given the heterogeneity in hardware, mobile platform releases, and types of users, the reproduction step currently is one of the major challenges for app developers. This paper introduces MoTiF, a crowdsourced approach to support app developers in automatically reproducing context-sensitive crashes faced by end-users in the wild. In particular, by analyzing recurrent patterns in crash data, the shortest sequence of events reproducing a crash is derived, and turned into a test suite. We evaluate MoTiF on concrete crashes that were crowdsourced or randomly generated on 5 Android apps, showing that MoTiF can reproduce existing crashes effectively.