API Change Driven Test Selection for Android Applications
Date
2019-12
Authors
Rouijel, Jihan
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Abstract
People are becoming increasingly dependent on their mobile devices day after day. As a result, mobile developers strive to introduce innovative applications (or simply apps) with new functionalities and features. To keep up with this need; Android Application Programing Interfaces (APIs) are updated frequently, which can affect the functionality of the Android apps that are built upon them. Developers therefore need to test their apps between each update to ensure high reliability. However, running the entire test suite can be costly and time-consuming. Previous research has focused on how Android API change impacts the app code, but no research has extended this finding to further analyze the API change impact on app tests to help increase the efficiency of API change driven regression testing. This paper introduces a novel approach which leverages the results from app code impact analysis and coverage information to identify the tests that are impacted by the API changes. The results of experiments on real-world android mobile apps show that this approach increases the efficiency of android app testing by reducing the number of tests selected for re-execution and thus reducing the time needed for regression testing.
Description
Keywords
android, API, impact analysis, regression testing, test selection, Honors College
Citation
Rouijel, J. (2019). API change driven test selection for android applications (Unpublished thesis). Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas.