Acteve++: An Improved Android Application Automatic Tester Based on Acteve

• Main Authors: Jiawei Qin, Hua Zhang, Senmiao Wang, Zhikui Geng, Tengfei Chen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2019-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Android application automatic testing; dynamic symbolic execution; activity exploration; test coverage
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8657933/

As the Android application increases in number, it is a challenge for researchers to test Android applications automatically. Acteve based on dynamic symbolic execution proposes a new method and achieves higher coverage. But it cannot achieve the ideal test coverage due to incomplete events input and some missing activities. In this paper, we propose an improvement scheme, making Acteve can produce broadcast events as test inputs, and has the capability to find more activities. Based on these improved schemes, we design Android applications automatic tester, Acteve++. We experimented and analyzed existing representative Android automated testing tools: Monkey, Dynodroid, GUIRipper, Acteve, and Acteve++ on an open test set. The experiments show that Acteve++ achieves high average test coverage in an acceptable time.