AST 2023
Mon 15 - Tue 16 May 2023 Melbourne, Australia
co-located with ICSE 2023
Tue 16 May 2023 12:07 - 12:30 at Meeting Room 107 - Test Flakiness

A common feature in Android apps is saving, or exporting, user’s work (e.g., a drawing) as well as data (e.g., a spreadsheet) onto local storage, as a file. Due to the volatile nature of the OS and the mobile environment in general, the system can terminate apps without notice, which prevents the execution of file write operations; consequently, user data that was supposed to be saved/exported is instead lost. Testing apps for such potential losses raises several challenges: how to identify data originating from user input or resulting from user action (then check whether it is saved), and how to reproduce a potential error by terminating the app at the exact moment when unsaved changes are pending. We address these challenges via an approach that finds potential ``lost writes'', i.e., user data supposed to be written to a file, but the file write does not take place due to system-initiated termination. Our approach consists of two phases: a static analysis that finds potential losses and a dynamic loss verification phase where we compare lossy and lossless system-level file write traces to confirm errors. We ran our analysis on 2,182 apps from Google Play and 38 apps from F-Droid. Our approach found 163 apps where termination caused losses, including losing user’s app-specific data, notes, photos, user’s work and settings. In contrast, two state-of-the-art tools aimed at finding volatility errors in Android apps failed to discover the issues we found.

Tue 16 May

Displayed time zone: Hobart change

11:00 - 12:30
Test FlakinessAST 2023 at Meeting Room 107
11:00
22m
Talk
On the Effect of Instrumentation on Test Flakiness
AST 2023
Shawn Rasheed Universal College of Learning, Jens Dietrich Victoria University of Wellington, Amjed Tahir Massey University
Pre-print
11:22
22m
Talk
Debugging Flaky Tests using Spectrum-based Fault Localization
AST 2023
Martin Gruber BMW Group, University of Passau, Gordon Fraser University of Passau
Pre-print
11:45
22m
Talk
FlakyCat: Predicting Flaky Tests Categories using Few-Shot Learning
AST 2023
Amal Akli University of Luxembourg, Guillaume Haben University of Luxembourg, Sarra Habchi Ubisoft, Mike Papadakis University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Yves Le Traon University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
12:07
22m
Talk
Detecting Potential User-data Save & Export Losses due to Android App Termination
AST 2023
Sydur Rahaman New Jersey Institute of Technology, Umar Farooq University of California at Riverside, Iulian Neamtiu New Jersey Institute of Technology, Zhijia Zhao University of California at Riverside