Profile Coverage: Using Android Compilation Profiles to Evaluate Dynamic Testing
This program is tentative and subject to change.
The rising complexity of Android apps makes comprehensive dynamic testing infeasible, especially for third-party apps. Knowing which methods are exercised by real users typically requires costly user studies or access to usage telemetry. We show that Android’s compilation profiles, specifically Cloud Profiles collected by the Google Play Store, offer a readily available, underutilized source of such information. These operational profiles aggregate which methods are commonly executed across users and guide ahead-of-time compilation during app installation. We provide the first in-depth characterization of Baseline Profiles and Cloud Profiles and show that over 99.89% of the top 1000 apps include usage-derived cloud profiles.
Based on this insight, we introduce profile coverage, a novel metric that measures how well dynamic testing exercises the methods real users interact with. This metric builds on the idea of operational coverage and enables a more holistic evaluation of automated test input generators. To enable profile coverage measurements, we develop a lightweight tracer, ProfTrace, based on Linux kernel uprobes that requires no app or system modifications. We demonstrate its utility by comparing three tools and a no-interaction baseline on 50 popular apps, showing that profile coverage reveals differences that traditional code coverage misses. For instance, in Candy Crush, automated testing achieves only 2.22% method coverage, but 21.39% profile coverage—indicating better alignment with user behavior than traditional code coverage would suggest.
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Wed 19 NovDisplayed time zone: Seoul change
11:00 - 12:30 | |||
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11:10 10mTalk | GlassWing: A Tailored Static Analysis Approach for Flutter Android Apps Research Papers Xiangyu Zhang DISSec, NDST, College of Cyber Science, Nankai University, China, Yucheng Su Intelligence and Offensive Defense Lab, Xiaohongshu Inc., China, Lingling Fan Nankai University, Miaoying Cai DISSec, NDST, College of Cyber Science, Nankai University, China, Sen Chen Nankai University | ||
11:20 10mTalk | Characterizing and Repairing Color-Related Accessibility Issues in Android Apps Research Papers | ||
11:30 10mTalk | Generating Failure-Based Oracles to Support Testing of Reported Bugs in Android Apps Research Papers Jack Johnson University of Minnesota, Junayed Mahmud University of Central Florida, Oscar Chaparro William & Mary, Kevin Moran University of Central Florida, Mattia Fazzini University of Minnesota | ||
11:40 10mTalk | On the (In)Security of Non-resettable Device Identifiers in Custom Android Systems Research Papers Zikan Dong Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Liu Wang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Guoai Xu Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, Haoyu Wang Huazhong University of Science and Technology | ||
11:50 10mTalk | Don't Mess with Bro's Cheese! An Empirical Study of Resource Conflict in Android Multi-window Research Papers Chenkai Guo Nankai University, China, Huimin Zhao College of Cryptology and Cyber Science, Nankai University, Tianhong Wang College of Computer Science, Nankai University, Naipeng Dong The University of Queensland, Australia, Qingqing Dong College of Cryptology and Cyber Science, Nankai University, Jiarui Che College of Computer Science, Nankai University, Yaqiong Qiao College of Cryptology and Cyber Science, Nankai University, Xiangyang Luo State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing, Zheli Liu Nankai University | ||
12:00 10mTalk | Profile Coverage: Using Android Compilation Profiles to Evaluate Dynamic Testing Research Papers Pre-print | ||
12:10 10mTalk | NATE: A Network-Aware Testing Enhancer for Network-Related Fault Detection in Android Apps Research Papers Yuanhong Lan Nanjing University, Shaoheng Cao Nanjing University, Yifei Lu State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, China, Minxue Pan Nanjing University, Xuandong Li Nanjing University | ||
12:20 10mTalk | Automated Detection of Web Application Navigation Barriers for Screen Reader Users Research Papers Shubhi Jain University of California, Irvine, Syed Fatiul Huq University of California, Irvine, Ziyao He University of California, Irvine, Sam Malek University of California at Irvine | ||