Automated GUI Testing for Android News Applications

Automated GUI (graphical user interface) testing tools have been used to help engineers test whether the software GUI is displayed correctly in different smartphones. However, due to different screen aspect ratios, the ratio of width to height, the same content of a mobile application (app) may have a different layout in different smartphones. As a result, the test oracle generated by traditional methods may not be reused for different smartphones and thus prolong the testing process. In this paper, we present a GUI testing tool, named FLAG (Fully Automatic mobile GUI testing), which aims to make the test oracle reusable without compromising test accuracy. In addition, the whole testing process, including generating test cases, simulating user gestures and verifying results, is automatically performed by FLAG without human interaction. News applications have been selected for our study not only because they are popular, but also because they support most commonly-used user gestures, such as tap, scroll, spread and pinch. In our experiment, we selected five commercial Android phones and one popular news apps to evaluate the effectiveness of the FLAG. Our experiment results show that the FLAG performs better than existing methods and can achieve an average accuracy of 95.20% in determining whether a test has passed or failed.