research-article

Dynodroid: an input generation system for Android apps

Authors:

Aravind Machiry,

Rohan Tahiliani,

Mayur NaikAuthors Info & Claims

ESEC/FSE 2013: Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

Pages 224 - 234

https://doi.org/10.1145/2491411.2491450

Published: 18 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

We present a system Dynodroid for generating relevant inputs to unmodified Android apps. Dynodroid views an app as an event-driven program that interacts with its environment by means of a sequence of events through the Android framework. By instrumenting the framework once and for all, Dynodroid monitors the reaction of an app upon each event in a lightweight manner, using it to guide the generation of the next event to the app. Dynodroid also allows interleaving events from machines, which are better at generating a large number of simple inputs, with events from humans, who are better at providing intelligent inputs.

We evaluated Dynodroid on 50 open-source Android apps, and compared it with two prevalent approaches: users manually exercising apps, and Monkey, a popular fuzzing tool. Dynodroid, humans, and Monkey covered 55%, 60%, and 53%, respectively, of each app's Java source code on average. Monkey took 20X more events on average than Dynodroid. Dynodroid also found 9 bugs in 7 of the 50 apps, and 6 bugs in 5 of the top 1,000 free apps on Google Play.

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Cited By

Pan XHuan ZLi YCao Y(2024)Enhancement of GUI Display Error Detection Using Improved Faster R-CNN and Multi-Scale Attention MechanismApplied Sciences10.3390/app1403114414:3(1144)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/app14031144
Lan YLu YPan MLi XFilkov VRay BZhou M(2024)Navigating Mobile Testing Evaluation: A Comprehensive Statistical Analysis of Android GUI Testing MetricsProceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3691620.3695476(944-956)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3691620.3695476
Yu SFang CLi XLing YChen ZSu Z(2024)Effective, Platform-Independent GUI Testing via Image Embedding and Reinforcement LearningACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/367472833:7(1-27)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2024
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Index Terms

Dynodroid: an input generation system for Android apps
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ESEC/FSE 2013: Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

August 2013

738 pages

ISBN:9781450322379

DOI:10.1145/2491411

General Chair:
Bertrand Meyer
ETH Zurich, Switzerland
,
Program Chairs:
Luciano Baresi
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
,
Mira Mezini
TU Darmstadt, Germany

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 August 2013

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ESEC/FSE'13

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SIGSOFT

ESEC/FSE'13: Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

August 18 - 26, 2013

Saint Petersburg, Russia

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.3390/app14031144
Lan YLu YPan MLi XFilkov VRay BZhou M(2024)Navigating Mobile Testing Evaluation: A Comprehensive Statistical Analysis of Android GUI Testing MetricsProceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3691620.3695476(944-956)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3691620.3695476
Yu SFang CLi XLing YChen ZSu Z(2024)Effective, Platform-Independent GUI Testing via Image Embedding and Reinforcement LearningACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/367472833:7(1-27)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3674728
Hu HWang HDong RChen XChen C(2024)Enhancing GUI Exploration Coverage of Android Apps with Deep Link-Integrated MonkeyACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/366481033:6(1-31)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3664810
Tao ZGao YQi JPeng CWu QChen XYang Pd'Amorim M(2024)Neat: Mobile App Layout Similarity Comparison Based on Graph Convolutional NetworksCompanion Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3663529.3663832(104-114)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
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Samhi JZeller Ad'Amorim M(2024)AndroLog: Android Instrumentation and Code Coverage AnalysisCompanion Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3663529.3663806(597-601)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
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Zhao YHarrison BYu T(2024)DinoDroid: Testing Android Apps Using Deep Q-NetworksACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/365215033:5(1-24)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2024
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Zhang YZhu QYan JLiu CZhang WZhao YHao DZhang LChristakis MPradel M(2024)Synthesis-Based Enhancement for GUI Test Case MigrationProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3680327(869-881)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
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Thung FIrsan ILiu JLo DRubin JLam WCatolino GPoshyvanyk D(2024)Towards Benchmarking the Coverage of Automated Testing Tools in Android against Manual TestingProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 11th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems10.1145/3647632.3651394(74-77)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
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Salma SMansur SZhang YMoran KSpinellis DConstantinou EBacchelli A(2024)GuiEvo: Automated Evolution of Mobile App UIsProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3643991.3644936(335-347)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
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