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Understanding the Reproducibility Issues of Monkey for GUI Testing

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Dependable Software Engineering. Theories, Tools, and Applications (SETTA 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14464))

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Abstract

Automated GUI testing is an essential activity in developing Android apps. Monkey is a widely used representative automated input generation (AIG) tool to efficiently and effectively detect crash bugs in Android apps. However, it faces challenges in reproducing the crash bugs it detects. To deeply understand the symptoms and root causes of these challenges, we conducted a comprehensive study on the reproducibility issues of Monkey with Android apps. We focused on Monkey’s capability to reproduce crash bugs using its built-in replay functionality and explored the root causes of its failures. Specifically, we selected six popular open-source apps and conducted automated instrumentation on them to monitor the invocations of event handlers within the apps. Subsequently, we performed GUI testing with Monkey on these instrumented apps for 6,000 test cases and collected 56 unique crash bugs. For each bug, we replayed it 200 times using Monkey’s replay function and calculated the success rate. Through manual analysis of screen recording files, log files of event handlers, and the source code of the apps, we pinpointed five root causes contributing to Monkey’s reproducibility issues: Injection Failure, Event Ambiguity, Data Loading, Widget Loading, and Dynamic Content. Our research showed that only 36.6% of the replays successfully reproduced the crash bugs, shedding light on Monkey’s limitations in consistently reproducing detected crash bugs. Additionally, we delved deep into the unsuccessfully reproduced replays to discern the root causes behind the reproducibility issues and offered insights for developing future AIG tools.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the SETTA reviewers for their valuable feedback, Yiheng Xiong and Shan Huang from East China Normal University for their insightful comments, and Cong Li from Nanjing University for the mechanism of Rx. This work was supported in part by National Key Research and Development Program (Grant 2022YFB3104002), NSFC Grant 62072178, “Digital Silk Road” Shanghai International Joint Lab of Trustworthy Intelligent Software under Grant 22510750100, and the Shanghai Collaborative Innovation Center of Trusted Industry Internet Software.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shanghai Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Computing, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Huiyu Liu, Qichao Kong, Ting Su & Haiying Sun

  2. Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Jue Wang

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  1. Huiyu Liu
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  2. Qichao Kong
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  3. Jue Wang
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  4. Ting Su
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Correspondence to Jue Wang or Haiying Sun .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Holger Hermanns

  2. Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore

    Jun Sun

  3. Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Lei Bu

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Liu, H., Kong, Q., Wang, J., Su, T., Sun, H. (2024). Understanding the Reproducibility Issues of Monkey for GUI Testing. In: Hermanns, H., Sun, J., Bu, L. (eds) Dependable Software Engineering. Theories, Tools, and Applications. SETTA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14464. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8664-4_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8664-4_8

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