Practical GUI testing of Android applications via model abstraction and refinement

This paper introduces a new, fully automated model-based approach for effective testing of Android apps. Different from existing model-based approaches that guide testing with a static GUI model (i.e., the model does not evolve its abstraction during testing, and is thus often imprecise), our approach dynamically optimizes the model by leveraging the runtime information during testing. This capability of model evolution significantly improves model precision, and thus dramatically enhances the testing effectiveness compared to existing approaches, which our evaluation confirms. We have realized our technique in a practical tool, Ape. On 15 large, widely-used apps from the Google Play Store, Ape outperforms the state-of-the-art Android GUI testing tools in terms of both testing coverage and the number of detected unique crashes. To further demonstrate Ape's effectiveness and usability, we conduct another evaluation of Ape on 1,316 popular apps, where it found 537 unique crashes. Out of the 38 reported crashes, 13 have been fixed and 5 have been confirmed.