AMOGA: A Static-Dynamic Model Generation Strategy for Mobile Apps Testing

Abstract

In the past few years, mobile devices have been increasingly replacing traditional computers, as their capabilities, such as CPU computation, memory, RAM size, and many more, are being enhanced almost to the level of conventional computers. These capabilities are being exploited by mobile apps developers to produce apps that offer more functionalities and optimized performance. To ensure acceptable quality and to meet their specifications (e.g., design), mobile apps need to be tested thoroughly. As the testing process is often tedious, test automation can be the key to alleviating such laborious activities. In the context of the Android-based mobile apps, researchers and practitioners have proposed many approaches to automate the testing process mainly on the creation of the test suite. Although useful, most existing approaches rely on reverse engineering a model of the application under test for test case creation. Often, such approaches exhibit a lack of comprehensiveness, as the application model does not capture the dynamic behavior of the applications extensively due to the incompleteness of reverse engineering approaches. To address this issue, this paper proposes AMOGA, a strategy that uses a hybrid, static-dynamic approach for generating a user interface model from mobile apps for model-based testing. AMOGA implements a novel crawling technique that uses the event list of UI element associated with each event to dynamically exercise the events ordering at the run time to explore the applications' behavior. An experimental evaluation was performed to assess the effectiveness of our strategy by measuring the code coverage and the fault detection capability through the use of mutation testing concept. The results of the experimental assessment showed that AMOGA represents an alternative approach for model-based testing of mobile apps by generating comprehensive models to improve the coverage of the applications. The strategy proved its effectiveness by achieving high code coverage and mutation score for different applications.

Keywords

• Automated testing
• reverse engineering
• UI Model
• mobile apps
• model-based testing
• GUI testing