Regression Test Selection for Android Applications

Mobile platform pervades human life, and much research in recent years has focused on improving the reliability of mobile applications on this platform, for example by applying automatic testing. However, researchers have primarily considered testing of single version of mobile applications. Although regression testing has been extensively studied for desktop applications, the approaches for desktop applications cannot be directly applied to mobile applications. Our approach leverages the combination of static impact analysis and dynamic code coverage information, and identifies a subset of test cases for re-execution on the modified app version. We implement our approach for Android apps, and illustrate its usefulness based on an Android application.

1. Introduction

Mobile devices have become ubiquitous in modern society. The mobile platform is separating itself from a variety of areas of desktop applications such as entertainment, e-commerce and social media. Thus, developers are required to produce high quality mobile applications (or simply, “apps”) in terms of portability, reliability and security. In recent years, a great deal of research has been performed to improve the reliability of mobile apps on mobile platform, for example by applying automatic testing [2].