A Deep Learning based Approach to Automated Android App Testing
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Automated input generators are widely used for large-scale dynamic analysis and testing of mobile apps. Such input generators must constantly choose which UI element to interact with and how to interact with it, in order to achieve high coverage with a limited time budget. Currently, most input generators adopt pseudo-random or brute-force searching strategies, which may take very long to find the correct combination of inputs that can drive the app into new and important states. In this paper, we propose Humanoid, a deep learning-based approach to automated Android app testing. Our insight is that if we can learn from human-generated interaction traces, it is possible to generate human-like test inputs based on the visual information in the current UI state and the latest state transitions. We design and implement a deep neural network model to learn how end-users would interact with an app (specifically, which UI elements to interact with and how), and show that we can successfully generate human-like inputs for any new UI based on the learned model. We then apply the model to automated testing of Android apps and demonstrate that it is able to reach higher coverage, and faster as well, than the state-of-the-art test input generators.
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