From Suspicious Signals to Crashes: Guiding Bug-driven GUI Testing via Code-inspired Tracing
Mobile applications frequently suffer from crash bugs that are triggered under specific GUI interaction sequences. Existing automated GUI testing techniques mainly emphasize increasing coverage through diverse exploration strategies, but they often fail to reach the precise interaction contexts that lead to crashes, resulting in low bug detection efficiency. This paper proposes TraceDroid, a novel automated GUI testing approach that leverages suspicious code-level signals to guide dynamic exploration. Instead of treating static analysis as an independent detection method, TraceDroid uses heuristic rules distilled from real crash reports to detect suspicious code segments, associate them with GUI widgets, and collect code-level interaction signals. It then constructs the Activity Transition Graph (ATG), performs rough path generation, and employs LLM-based executable path completion to produce a set of suspicious paths. Finally, TraceDroid executes these paths through global path planning, local path generation, and execution-aware monitoring to efficiently expose crashes.
We evaluate TraceDroid on 70 real crash bugs across 42 open-source apps, comparing it with 15 state-of-the-art baselines. TraceDroid achieves the best performance, with a recall of 77%, exceeding the best baseline by 28%, while maintaining comparable or higher coverage. Furthermore, TraceDroid successfully detects 21 previously unknown crash bugs in 116 popular Google Play apps, of which 15 have been fixed and 6 confirmed by developers, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world scenarios.
Thu 9 JulDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
14:00 - 15:20 | GUI TestingResearch Papers / Journal-First Paper / Ideas, Visions and Reflections at MB 2.430 Chair(s): Shin Yoo KAIST | ||
14:00 20mTalk | VLM-Fuzz: Vision Language Model Assisted Recursive Depth-First Search Exploration for Effective GUI Testing of Android Apps Journal-First Paper Biniam Fisseha Demissie Technology Innovation Institute, Abu Dhabi, UAE, Yan Naing Tun Singapore Management University, Lwin Khin Shar Singapore Management University, Mariano Ceccato University of Verona | ||
14:20 20mTalk | From Suspicious Signals to Crashes: Guiding Bug-driven GUI Testing via Code-inspired Tracing Research Papers Mengzhuo Chen Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhe Liu Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chunyang Chen TU Munich, Junjie Wang Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Boyu Wu Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yuekai Huang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jun Hu Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qing Wang Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences | ||
14:40 20mTalk | WebTestPilot: Agentic End-to-End Web Testing against Natural Language Specification by Inferring Oracles with Symbolized GUI Elements Research Papers Xiwen Teoh National University of Singapore, Yun Lin Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Duc-Minh Nguyen Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Ruofei Ren Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Wenjie Zhang National University of Singapore, Jin Song Dong National University of Singapore Pre-print | ||
15:00 10mTalk | From GUI Tests to Conversational Interaction: A New Perspective on App-Specific Voice Assistants Ideas, Visions and Reflections Media Attached File Attached | ||
15:10 20mTalk | TUSR: A Test Unit–Based Framework for Repairing Obsolete GUI Test Scripts Research Papers | ||