Making Android apps monkey-friendly

Abstract

Monkey testing is a random testing technique in which a stream of pseudo-random events are automatically fired on the GUI of the application under test, usually with the purpose of robustness testing or responsiveness analysis. A line of research is dedicated to addressing the limitations of monkey testing for Android apps. However, all the existing works try to improve the underlying algorithms or techniques used by the monkey testing tools. In this vision paper, we propose the idea of improving the effectiveness of monkey testing by automatically refactoring the application under test. We provide two sample scenarios in which this idea can be used to address limitations of monkey testing for Android applications.