ADAutomation: An activity diagram based automated GUI testing framework for smartphone applications

Under the increasing complexity and time-to-market pressures, functional validation is becoming a major bottleneck of smartphone applications running on mobile platforms (e.g., Android, iOS). Due to the GUI (Graphical User Interface) intensive nature, the execution of smartphone applications heavily relies on the interactions with users. Manual GUI testing is extremely slow and unacceptably expensive in practice. However, the lack of formal models of user behaviors in the design phase hinders the automation of GUI testing (i.e., test case generation and test evaluation). While thorough test efforts are required to ensure the consistency between user behavior specifications and GUI implementations, few of existing testing approaches can automatically utilize the design phase information to test complex smartphone applications. Based on UML activity diagrams, this paper proposes an automated GUI testing framework called AD Automation, which supports user behavior modeling, GUI test case generation, and post-test analysis and debugging. The experiments using two industrial smartphone applications demonstrate that our approach can not only drastically reduce overall testing time, but also improve the quality of designs.