一句话：首次刻画 Android 应用中的易错操作异常（EPA），并提出基于动态 GUI 测试的自动检测工具 EP-Detector。
Android 应用广泛使用，但开发者常偏重功能与性能而忽视用户体验。设计不良的页面元素会使用户困惑并导致非预期操作，即易错操作异常（EPA）。本文首次系统研究 EPA 问题，从主体、客体和环境三个维度分析其根因，并通过多阶段属性捕获与相似度计算将成因细分为混淆行为、布局不当和资源过载。基于这些洞见，作者提出动态 GUI 测试工具 EP-Detector，具备基于控件探索的目标导航和自动测试预言，可较全面且精确地检测易错页面元素并模拟事件。在 53 款流行 Android 应用上的实验验证了工具的高精度与完整性，并发现 EPA 普遍存在：平均每两个页面控件就至少有一个 EPA，其中 28.3% 可能引发安全或功能问题与风险。
Android applications are pervasively adopted and heavily relied on in our daily life, leading to the growing demand for enhanced user experiences, such as ease for operation and robustness. Nevertheless, developers continue to prioritize traditional functionality and performance, overlooking the pivotal role of user experience in real-world scenarios. For example, poorly designed page elements can lead to user confusion, resulting in unexpected outcomes, termed as the error-prone operation anomalies (EPAs). In this work, we undertake the first effort to uncover the underlying essence of the EPA problem. To achieve this objective, we investigated the root causes of EPAs from three dimensions, i.e., subject, object and environment. These causes were identified by multi-stage attribute capturing and precise similarity computation. In this process, the causes are categorized into fine-grained classes, namely confusing behaviours, unsuitable layout, and resource overload. Building upon these insights, we propose a dynamic GUI-based testing tool EP-Detector to facilitate detecting the EPAs in real-world apps. The EP-Detector is equipped with widget-exploration based target navigation and automatic test oracle, enabling it to detect error-prone page elements and simulate events with both comprehensiveness and precision. To systematically study the prevalence and severity of real-world EPAs, we conducted experiments on 53 popular Android apps with EP-Detector. The confirmed results not only validate the high precision and completeness of EP-Detector but also highlight that EPAs are prevalent in current apps, with at least one EPA existing in every two page widgets on average, and 28.3% of them may lead to security and functionality issues or risks. The EP-Detector is available at https://github.com/WordDealer/EP-Detector.
DOI 原文 ·
@inproceedings{paperbot8886,
title = {EP-Detector: Automatic Detection of Error-Prone Operation Anomalies in Android Applications},
author = {Chenkai Guo and Qianlu Wang and Naipeng Dong and Lingling Fan and Tianhong Wang and Weijie Zhang and Enbao Chen and Zheli Liu and Lu Yu},
booktitle = {ICSE},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.1109/icse55347.2025.00029}
}