ICPC 2025
Sun 27 - Mon 28 April 2025 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
co-located with ICSE 2025
Sun 27 Apr 2025 10:15 - 10:25 at 205 - App Comprehension Chair(s): Coen De Roover, Gema Rodríguez-Pérez

The login functionality, being the gateway to app usage, plays a critical role in both user experience and application security. As Android apps increasingly incorporate login functionalities, they support a variety of authentication methods with complicated login processes, catering for personalized user experiences. However, the complexities in managing different operations in login processes make it difficult for developers to handle them correctly. In this paper, we present the first empirical study of login issues in Android apps. We analyze 361 issues from 44 popular open-source Android repositories, examining the root causes, symptoms, and trigger conditions of these issues. Our findings indicate that the vast majority of the login issues are induced by the improper handling of complex state transitions during the login process, which can prevent users from logging in or misdirect them to incorrect subsequent actions. Additionally, we observed that issues related to this cause typically require the convergence of multiple trigger conditions to manifest. These findings can help developers to model the login processes which can help them to identify the causes of issues and design targeted test cases and precise test oracles. Our dataset has been made openly available to facilitate future research in this area.

Sun 27 Apr

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

09:00 - 10:30
App ComprehensionResearch Track / / at 205
Chair(s): Coen De Roover Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Gema Rodríguez-Pérez Department of Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics and Statistics, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus
09:00
15m
Day opening
Welcome by the Chairs
Opening
I: Michael W. Godfrey University of Waterloo, Canada
09:15
50m
Keynote
Theories of Program Comprehension in the Age of LLMs
ICPC Keynotes
K: Thomas LaToza George Mason University
10:05
10m
Talk
Combining Language and App UI Analysis for the Automated Assessment of Bug Reproduction Steps
Research Track
Junayed Mahmud University of Central Florida, Antu Saha William & Mary, Oscar Chaparro William & Mary, Kevin Moran University of Central Florida, Andrian Marcus George Mason University
Pre-print
10:15
10m
Talk
Characterizing Bugs in Login Processes of Android Applications: An Empirical Study
Research Track
Zixu Zhou McGill University, Rufeng Chen McGill University, Junfeng Chen Southern University of Science and Technology, Yepang Liu Southern University of Science and Technology, Lili Wei McGill University
Pre-print
10:25
5m
Live Q&A
Session's Discussion: "App Comprehension"
Research Track