Iterative Android automated testing

With the benefits of reducing time and workforce, automated testing has been widely used for the quality assurance of mobile applications (APPs). Compared with automated testing, manual testing can achieve higher coverage in complex interactive Activities. And the effectiveness of manual testing is highly dependent on the user operation process (UOP) of experienced testers. Based on the UOP, we propose an iterative Android automated testing (IAAT) method that automatically records, extracts, and integrates UOPs to guide the test logic of the tool across the complex Activity iteratively. The feedback test results can train the UOPs to achieve higher coverage in each iteration. We extracted 50 UOPs and conducted experiments on 10 popular mobile APPs to demonstrate IAAT's effectiveness compared with Monkey and the initial automated tests. The experimental results show a noticeable improvement in the IAAT compared with the test logic without human knowledge. Under the 60 minutes test time, the average code coverage is improved by 13.98% to 37.83%, higher than the 27.48% of Monkey under the same conditions.

Automated summary

Automated testing has been widely used for quality assurance of mobile apps, but manual testing can achieve higher coverage in complex activities. The effectiveness of manual testing depends on the user operation process (UOP) of experienced testers. This study proposes an iterative Android automated testing (IAAT) method that utilizes UOPs to guide the test logic and improve coverage. Experimental results show that IAAT significantly improves code coverage compared to Monkey and initial automated tests, with an average increase of 13.98% to 37.83% under a 60-minute test time.