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Evaluating Sensor Interaction Failures in Mobile Applications

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Quality of Information and Communications Technology (QUATIC 2021)

Abstract

Mobile devices have a rich set of small-scale sensors which improve the functionalities possibilities. The growing use of mobile applications has aroused the interest of researchers in testing mobile applications. However, sensor interaction failures are a challenging and still a little-explored aspect of research. Unexpected behavior because the sensor interactions can introduce failures that manifest themselves in specific sensor configurations. Sensor interaction failures can compromise the mobile application’s quality and harm the user’s experience. We propose an approach for extending test suites of mobile applications in order to evaluate the sensor interactions aspects of mobile applications. We used eight sensors to verify the occurrence of sensor interaction failures. We generated all configurations considering the sensors enabled or disabled. We observed that some pairs of sensors cause failures in some applications including those not so obvious.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.traccar.org.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/traccar/traccar-client-android/issues/390.

  3. 3.

    Apr 20, 2021.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/androiddevnotes/awesome-android-kotlin-apps.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc.

  6. 6.

    A kind of test that runs on devices or emulators: https://developer.android.com/studio/test.

  7. 7.

    https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/sensors/sensors_position.

  8. 8.

    https://developer.android.com/about/versions/pie/power.

  9. 9.

    https://support.google.com/android/answer/9069335?hl=en.

  10. 10.

    https://support.google.com/android/answer/9083864?hl=en.

  11. 11.

    https://source.android.com/devices/sensors/sensors-off.

  12. 12.

    https://developer.android.com/training/testing/ui-automator.

  13. 13.

    https://developer.android.com/training/testing/junit-runner.

  14. 14.

    http://rasbt.github.io/mlxtend/user_guide/frequent_patterns/apriori/.

  15. 15.

    https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/exifinterface/media/ExifInterface.

  16. 16.

    https://developers.google.com/location-context/fused-location-provider.

  17. 17.

    https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/3467281?hl=en.

  18. 18.

    https://github.com/quatic2021-sensorinterpaper/artifacts.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by Brazilian funding agencies: CNPq, CAPES, and FAPEMIG.

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Correspondence to Euler Horta Marinho or Eduardo Figueiredo .

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Marinho, E.H., Diniz, J.P., Ferreira, F., Figueiredo, E. (2021). Evaluating Sensor Interaction Failures in Mobile Applications. In: Paiva, A.C.R., Cavalli, A.R., Ventura Martins, P., Pérez-Castillo, R. (eds) Quality of Information and Communications Technology. QUATIC 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1439. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85347-1_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85347-1_5

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