skip to main content
column

How to the Smash Next Billion Mobile App Bugs?

Published: 01 June 2015 Publication History

Abstract

With users increasingly dependent on their phones, tablets, and wearables, the mobile app ecosystem is more important today than ever before. Creating and distributing apps has never been more accessible. Even single developers can now reach global audiences. But mobile apps must cope with extremely varied and dynamic operating conditions due to factors like diverse device characteristics, wireless network heterogeneity, and varied user behavior. App developers and operators of app marketplaces both lack testing tools that can effectively account for such diversity and, as a result, app failures and performance bugs (like excessive energy consumption) are commonly found today. To address this challenge to mobile app development, we have developed key techniques for scalable automated mobile app testing within two prototype services --- VanarSena and Caiipa. In this paper, we describe our vision for SMASH, a unified cloud-based mobile app testing service that combines the strengths of both previous systems to tackle the complexities presently faced by testers of mobile apps.

References

[1]
S. Agarwal, R. Mahajan, A. Zheng, and V. Bahl. Diagnosing Mobile Applications in the Wild. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, Hotnets- IX, pages 22:1--22:6, New York, NY, USA, 2010.
[2]
T. Azim and I. Neamtiu. Targeted and Depthfirst Exploration for Systematic Testing of Android Apps. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages & Applications, OOPSLA '13, pages 641--660, New York, NY, USA, 2013. ACM.
[3]
L. Batyuk, M. Herpich, S. A. Camtepe, K. Raddatz, A.-D. Schmidt, and S. Albayrak. Using Static Analysis for Automatic Assessment and Mitigation of Unwanted and Malicious Activities within Android Applications. In Proceedings of the 2011 6th International Conference on Malicious and Unwanted Software, MALWARE'11, pages 66--72, Washington, DC, USA, 2011. IEEE Computer Society.
[4]
Chieh-Jan Mike Liang, Nicholas D. Lane, Niels Brouwers, Li Zhang, Börje F. Karlsson, Hao Liu, Yan Liu, Jun Tang, Xiang Shan, Ranveer Chandra and Feng Zhao. Caiipa: Automated Largescale Mobile App Testing through Contextual Fuzzing. In Proceeding of the 20th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MobiCom '14, New York, NY, USA, 2014. ACM.
[5]
Fortune. 40 Staffers. 2 Reviews. 8,500 iPhone Apps per week. http://fortune.com/2009/08/22/40-staffers-2-reviews-8500-iphone-apps-per-week/.
[6]
P. Godefroid, M. Y. Levin, and D. A. Molnar. Automated Whitebox Fuzz Testing. In Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS '08. The Internet Society, 2008.
[7]
J. Huang, F. Qian, Q. Xu, Z. Qian, Z. M. Mao, and A. Rayes. Uncovering Cellular Network Characteristics: Performance, Infrastructure, and Policies. Technical Report MSU-CSE-00-2, 2013.
[8]
Open Signal. The Many Faces of a Little Green Robot. http://opensignal.com/reports/fragmentation.php.
[9]
L. Ravindranath, S. Nath, J. Padhye, and H. Balakrishnan. Automatic and Scalable Fault Detection for Mobile Applications. In Proceeding of the 12th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys '14, New York, NY, USA, 2014. ACM.
[10]
L. Ravindranath, J. Padhye, S. Agarwal, R. Mahajan, I. Obermiller, and S. Shayandeh. AppInsight: Mobile App Performance Monitoring in the Wild. In Proceedings of the 10th USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI'12, pages 107--120, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2012. USENIX Association.
[11]
Techcrunch. Mobile App Users Are Both Fickle And Loyal: Study. http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/15/mobile-app-users-are-bothfickle-and-loyal-study.
[12]
Wall Street Journal. The Surprising Numbers behind Apps. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/03/11/the-surprising-numbersbehind-apps/.

Cited By

View all
  • (2017)Towards A Contextual and Scalable Automated-testing Service for Mobile AppsProceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications10.1145/3032970.3032972(97-102)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2017
  • (2017)Characterizing testing methods for context-aware software systemsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2017.05.048131:C(1-21)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2017
  • (2016)Automatically Discovering, Reporting and Reproducing Android Application Crashes2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)10.1109/ICST.2016.34(33-44)Online publication date: Apr-2016

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image GetMobile: Mobile Computing and Communications
GetMobile: Mobile Computing and Communications  Volume 19, Issue 1
January 2015
34 pages
ISSN:2375-0529
EISSN:2375-0537
DOI:10.1145/2786984
Issue’s Table of Contents

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 June 2015
Published in SIGMOBILE-GETMOBILE Volume 19, Issue 1

Check for updates

Qualifiers

  • Column

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)1
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 14 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2017)Towards A Contextual and Scalable Automated-testing Service for Mobile AppsProceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications10.1145/3032970.3032972(97-102)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2017
  • (2017)Characterizing testing methods for context-aware software systemsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2017.05.048131:C(1-21)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2017
  • (2016)Automatically Discovering, Reporting and Reproducing Android Application Crashes2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)10.1109/ICST.2016.34(33-44)Online publication date: Apr-2016

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media