Poster: Automated Test Migration for Mobile Apps

The use of mobile apps is increasingly widespread, and much effort is put into testing these apps to make sure they behave as intended. To reduce this effort, and thus the cost of mobile app testing, we propose AppTestMigrator, a technique that allows for migrating test cases between apps with similar features. The intuition behind AppTestMigrator is that many apps share similarities in their functionality, and these similarities often result in conceptually similar user interfaces (through which that functionality is accessed). Typical examples of this situation are apps in the same category, apps developed based on the same specification, and different versions of the same app. In all these cases, the burden of writing test cases can be reduced by migrating test cases written for an app to another, similar app. Given a test case for an app (source app) and a second app (target app), AppTestMigrator attempts to automatically transform the sequence of events in the test for the source app to events that can be consumed by the target app. We implemented AppTestMigrator for Android mobile apps and evaluated our approach on four randomly selected shopping list apps from the Google Play Store. Our initial results are promising and motivate further research in this direction.