A Fast Crash Reproduction Method for Android Applications Based on Widget Hierarchy Graphs

To improve the efficiency of fixing bugs, mobile application developers must reproduce bugs reported by testers or users as quickly as possible. In some cases, automated testing tools can help developers reproduce crashes. However, these tools were not designed for reproducing bug reports. They are not efficient at reproducing crashes. To focus testing resources on suspicious widgets, we propose CrPDroid, a fast crash reproduction method for Android applications based on widget hierarchy graphs. First, it builds a widget hierarchy graph by using the project file of the application under test; then, it locates suspicious widgets by analyzing the bug report and the project file of the application under test and calculates the fitness of each widget according to the widget hierarchy graph; finally, it uses the fitness of widgets to guide automated testing to reproduce crashes quickly. To evaluate the effectiveness of CrPDroid, experiments are conducted on real Android application bug reports, and the crash reproduction tool ReCDroid, ReproBot and automated testing tools APE and PUMA are compared with CrPDroid. The experimental results show that CrPDroid successfully reproduces 15 bug reports that cause Android app crashes. In addition, compared with APE, PUMA, ReCDroid, and ReproBot, the average time for CrPDroid to reproduce crashes decreased by 76.87%, 81.94%, 95.58%, and 76.55%, and the total number of operations on suspicious widgets in the same period of testing time increased by 44.07%, 87.57%, 88.70%, and 68.93% on average, respectively.