Automatic android application GUI testing—A random walk approach

Android is one of the most popular operating system for smart phone and tablets. The fast growing of applications in the market with complex functionalities makes the testing of them a demanding task. Random testing is an effective measure to help testers to expose the bugs within the application. However, the built-in Monkey tool is still too primitive to expose bugs effectively. In this paper, we propose our improved monkey-testing tool, which improves the fault-detection capability of the monkey tool significantly with a series of optimizations. The empirical study shows that our improved monkey tool is more effective than the monkey on real-life Android applications.