Effective unit test generation for Android apps

Abstract

While the received wisdom says that testing at levels like classes and methods is necessary for detecting bugs in programs, the application of unit testing to Android development in practice is limited so far due to the lack of sufficient technical and tool support. This paper proposes the EvoDroid approach to the automated unit test suite generation for Android code. EvoDroid is inspired by Evoobj, a SOTA test generation technique for object-oriented Java programs based on Evo-SUITE. EvoObj generates unit test suites for Java methods and constructs object construction graphs to guide the synthesis of complex objects as test inputs. In contrast to that, EvoDroid generates test suites for Java classes, and its object synthesis is driven by input structure maps which are comparably effective but much less expensive to construct. EvoDroid also integrates the Robolectric framework to support running Android unit tests on regular Java virtual machines. Experimental evaluation results show that EvoDroid is both effective and efficient in generating unit test suites for Android.