Facilitating Monkey Test by Detecting Operable Regions in Rendered GUI of Mobile Game Apps

Graphical User Interface (GUI) is a component of many software applications. Many mobile game applications in particular have to provide excellent user experiences using graphical engines to render GUI screens. On a rendered GUI screen such as a treasury map, no GUI widget is embodied in it and the operable GUI regions, each of which is a region that triggers actions when certain events acting on these regions, may only be implicitly determinable. Traditional testing tools like monkey test do not effectively generate effective event sequences over such operable GUI regions. Our insight is that operable regions in a rendered GUI screen of many mobile game applications are given with visible hints to catch user attentions. In this paper, we propose Smart Monkey, which uses the fundamental features of a screen, including color, intensity, and texture, as visual signals to detect operable GUI region candidates, and iteratively identifies and confirms the real operable GUI regions by launching GUI events to the region. We have implemented Smart Monkey as a testing tool for Android apps and conducted case studies on real-world applications to compare it with a peer technique. The empirical results show that it effective in identifying such operable regions and thus able to generate functional event sequences more efficiently.