Exploration Scheduling for Replay Events in GUI Testing on Android Apps

Android GUI testing is an important research field to maintain software quality of Android apps. Although many GUI testing schemes have been investigated in the past, the discussion of exploration event scheduling has not been investigated comprehensively for the event replay process. Based on the component priority relationship, this study proposes a novel exploration event scheduling scheme called CPR to reduce the number of the testing events in the replay process. Compared with the breadth-first traversal scheme, the proposed CPR scheme can reduce up to 62% of testing events for achieving the same component coverage, and up to 69% of testing events for layout traversal. Compared with the depth-first traversal scheme, CPR can reduce up to 15% of testing events for achieving the same component coverage, and up to 42% of testing events for layout traversal. With respect to the testing time, CPR can achieve the best performance for most of the AUTs in the empirical study. The results of the empirical experiments show that the proposed CPR scheduling scheme can have the benefits in improving the testing performance.