Runtime-Environment Testing Method for Android Applications

One of the key problems in app testing is to improve the test coverage of apps. However, current testing techniques, whether in code coverage or activity coverage, are not satisfactory. To address this limitation, we present an algorithm for generating test runtime-environment-set to exercise mobile apps. Our approach is based on code analysis to systematically test the targeted code of the Android apps. It analyzes the decompiled code that identifies the code related to Android SDK version, generating the corresponding test cases with the runtime-environment set. We also implement our approach on Android, and validate the method with the existing widely used strategies. An empirical study of the practical usefulness of the technique has been presented on 6 widely-used industrial apps. 18 unique crashes have been found, and the method coverage has been increased by far 9.8% to 130.4% on those apps.