一句话：首次系统实证研究 Android 应用功能缺陷，并据此构建差分测试工具 RegDroid 发现未知缺陷。
Android 应用功能正确性至关重要，但对其功能缺陷仍缺乏系统理解。本文首次系统研究 8 个流行开源 Android 应用中的 399 个功能缺陷，分析根因、症状、测试预言及现有测试技术的能力与局限，并据此设计原型差分测试工具 RegDroid。该工具用于 5 个真实流行应用，发现 14 个功能缺陷，其中 10 个此前未知且影响最新版本，均被开发者确认修复；14 个中 10 个无法被现有测试技术发现。数据集与工具已公开。
Android apps are ubiquitous and serve many aspects of our daily lives. Ensuring their functional correctness is crucial for their success. To date, we still lack a general and in-depth understanding of functional bugs, which hinders the development of practices and techniques to tackle functional bugs. To fill this gap, we conduct the first systematic study on 399 functional bugs from 8 popular open-source and representative Android apps to investigate the root causes, bug symptoms, test oracles, and the capabilities and limitations of existing testing techniques. This study took us substantial effort. It reveals several new interesting findings and implications which help shed light on future research on tackling functional bugs. Furthermore, findings from our study guided the design of a proof-of-concept differential testing tool, RegDroid, to automatically find functional bugs in Android apps. We applied RegDroid on 5 real-world popular apps, and successfully discovered 14 functional bugs, 10 of which were previously unknown and affected the latest released versions—all these 10 bugs have been confirmed and fixed by the app developers. Specifically, 10 out of these 14 found bugs cannot be found by existing testing techniques. We have made all the artifacts (including the dataset of 399 functional bugs and RegDroid) in our work publicly available at https://github.com/Android-Functional-bugs-study/home.
@inproceedings{XiongX0SWWP0023,
title = {An Empirical Study of Functional Bugs in Android Apps},
author = {Yiheng Xiong and Mengqian Xu and Ting Su and Jingling Sun and Jue Wang and He Wen and Geguang Pu and Jifeng He and Zhendong Su},
booktitle = {ISSTA},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1145/3597926.3598138}
}