acl.01.2024.01.12

As mobile internet increasingly infiltrates into sectors such as education, payment, transportation, and healthcare, mobile applications are becoming more integral to people’s daily lives, education and work. Android applications, which are GUI (Graphical User Interface) based programs, have thus become a focal point for analysis and testing methods research. Current dynamic testing methods and technologies for application GUIs do not fully satisfy the requirements for automation and coverage. Most researchers rely on single-machine testing, which is inefficient for batch testing scenarios where numerous test tasks cannot be completed quickly. This paper proposes an automatic method for traversing the Android application GUI by simulating manual interactions. The method includes parsing the Android application configuration file to obtain information about the Activity components within the application, extracting control information from target window and generating corresponding user operations that are based on controls. After that, user behaviors are simulated and traversal algorithms are designed to construct a model for traversing the Android application. Moreover, a distributed task scheduling platform is developed to complete test tasks simultaneously in order to apply the approach in actual large-scale test. Experimental results show that the Activity coverage rate for the five tested applications is 26.56% to 45.17%, which is higher than the average rate in manual tests, demonstrating effectiveness of the automatic this approach and achieving higher coverage rate.