An Empirical Investigation of Fault Triggers in Android Operating System

The growing popularity and complexity of Android operating system makes it prone to suffer failures during usage, which increases difficulties of fixing bugs. Different strategies and mitigation methods can be developed and applied based on different types of bugs, which gives rise to the necessity to have a deep understanding of the nature of bugs in this system. In this paper, an empirical study is taken on 513 bug reports from Android operating system. A bug classification is conducted according to fault triggering conditions, followed by the analysis of bug types and bug attributes. Moreover, the comparison of bug types between Android and Linux is carried out. This paper reveals ten interesting findings based on the empirical results from these three aspects and further provides guidance for developers and users based on these findings.