Widget-Sensitive and Back-Stack-Aware GUI Exploration for Testing Android Apps

GUI exploration is a widely adopted technique to test GUI programs, which traverses the elements of screens during the user interaction and simultaneously constructs the GUI model to describe window transitions. Specific to Android apps, an elaborate GUI model should take Android characteristics into consideration. We propose a GUI exploration approach that dynamically acquires the information of these characteristics, such as the status of widgets and arrangement of the back stack. We attach this information to the window transition graph and form a new model called LATTE (LAbeled Transition graph with sTack and widgEt). To balance the accuracy and size of model, we introduce a metric "state similarity" to merge similar states. We perform experiments on 20 real-world apps to test them and construct their LATTE models. The investigation indicates that our systematic exploration approach with regard to the Android characteristics covers more program behaviors, and the generated model can be reused to direct the further testing.