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Mining Android API Usage to Generate Unit Test Cases for Pinpointing Compatibility Issues

  • Xiaoyu Sun
  • , Xiao Chen
  • , Yanjie Zhao
  • , Pei Liu
  • , John Grundy
  • , Li Li*
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • Monash University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Despite being one of the largest and most popular projects, the official Android framework has only provided test cases for less than 30% of its APIs. Such a poor test case coverage rate has led to many compatibility issues that can cause apps to crash at runtime on specific Android devices, resulting in poor user experiences for both apps and the Android ecosystem. To mitigate this impact, various approaches have been proposed to automatically detect such compatibility issues. Unfortunately, these approaches have only focused on detecting signature-induced compatibility issues (i.e., a certain API does not exist in certain Android versions), leaving other equally important types of compatibility issues unresolved. In this work, we propose a novel prototype tool, JUnitTestGen, to fill this gap by mining existing Android API usage to generate unit test cases. After locating Android API usage in given real-world Android apps, JUnitTestGen performs inter-procedural backward data-flow analysis to generate a minimal executable code snippet (i.e., test case). Experimental results on thousands of real-world Android apps show that JUnitTestGen is effective in generating valid unit test cases for Android APIs. We show that these generated test cases are indeed helpful for pinpointing compatibility issues, including ones involving semantic code changes.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2022
EditorsMario Aehnelt, Thomas Kirste
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)9781450396240
DOIs
StatePublished - 19 Sep 2022
Externally publishedYes
Event37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2022 - Rochester, United States
Duration: 10 Oct 202214 Oct 2022

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Conference

Conference37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityRochester
Period10/10/2214/10/22

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