一句话：揭示 Android UI 测试工具受 UIAutomator 操作低效拖累，提出基础设施层面的改进思路。
Android 应用质量保障需求促使研究者开发了众多 UI 测试工具，但近期研究表明，这些工具在流行工业应用上的代码覆盖率通常较低；在合理运行时间内，多数先进工具甚至无法超过简单的 Monkey。本文的动机研究进一步发现，这些工具依赖 Android 框架的 UIAutomator 执行 UI Hierarchy Capturing（捕获屏幕内容信息）和 UI Event Execution（执行点击等 UI 事件）两类操作，而这两类操作往往效率低下，合计平均占用 70% 的给定测试时间。基于此，论文从基础设施层面提出改进方法，以提升 Android UI 测试工具有效性；摘要主要报告了瓶颈定位，未给出所提方法的最终评估结果。
Due to the importance of Android app quality assurance, many Android UI testing tools have been developed by researchers over the years. However, recent studies show that these tools typically achieve low code coverage on popular industrial apps. In fact, given a reasonable amount of run time, most state-of-the-art tools cannot even outperform a simple tool, Monkey, on popular industrial apps with large codebases and sophisticated functionalities. Our motivating study finds that these tools perform two types of operations, UI Hierarchy Capturing (capturing information about the contents on the screen) and UI Event Execution (executing UI events, such as clicks), often inefficiently using UIAutomator, a component of the Android framework. In total, these two types of operations use on average 70% of the given test time.
DOI 原文 ·
@inproceedings{paperbot6695,
title = {An infrastructure approach to improving effectiveness of Android UI testing tools},
author = {Wenyu Wang and Wing Lam and Tao Xie},
booktitle = {ISSTA},
year = {2021},
doi = {10.1145/3460319.3464828}
}