A GUI-based automated test system for android applications

Abstract

Android application testing has always been a serious problem for mobile developers. To support developers, this paper presents GATS, a GUI-based automated test system for Android apps. This tool uses finite-state machine to learn a model of the app during testing, then uses the learned model to generate user inputs or system event to visit the rest states of the app, and then uses the result of the input to refine the model. The goal of the tool is to trigger crashes. When a crash is happened, GATS will generate a crash report containing screenshot, logcat info with stack trace crash, reproduction steps, and so on. We evaluate GATS on ten Android applications from the top list of several app markets with Monkey, a fuzzing tool from Android platform, and Dynodroid, a previous research. Our result shows that our system has less running time and more bugs found.