ReTestDroid: Towards Safer Regression Test Selection for Android Application

Mobile applications are widely used in our daily life and Android is the most popular open source mobile operating system. Because mobile applications update frequently, it is important developers to perform regression testing to ensure their quality. Modeling the control flow of an android application based on the activity lifecycle model only is imprecise for regression testing. Because many Android applications use asynchronous tasks, fragments, and native code frequently, which must be considered during change impact analysis. Otherwise, regression test selection techniques may miss some failure-revealing test cases, compromising the safety of these techniques. In this work, we propose a novel approach to model asynchronous task invocations, fragment-based activity lifecycle, and native code within the control flow graph of an Android application. Furthermore, we designed a regression test selection tool ReTestDroid based on our graph model. Our experiments on five real-life Android applications showed that our approach could enable much safer regression test selection while significantly saving regression-testing time.