Exploring Android Apps Using Motif Actions

Automated Android testing approaches often fail to interact properly with complex UIs consisting of multiple related elements. For instance, to trigger a state transition in a form-based UI, one has to first fill out all input fields and then click on the submit button, but test generators would usually interact with the fields and button in arbitrary order, struggling to trigger the corresponding state transition, and resulting in overall lower code coverage. One way to overcome this problem is to define motif actions, which allow test generators to interact not just with individual UI elements, but with combinations of UI elements related through common patterns of interaction sequences. We designed 12 such motif actions for common scenarios and integrated them into the Android test generation tool MATE. Our experiments demonstrate that these motif actions are applicable to a wide range of apps (86.5% out of a sample of 551 apps). Motif actions are particularly useful on complex apps, where our experiments on 109 such apps demonstrate an average increase of 2.19% activity coverage and 2% line coverage.