Data loss detector: automatically revealing data loss bugs in Android apps

• DOI: 10.1145/3395363.3397379
• Publication Date: 2020-07-13T21:44:18Z
• Authors: Oliviero Riganelli; Simone Paolo Mott...; Claudio Rota; Daniela Micucci; Leonardo Mariani
• Keywords: Software Engineering (cs.SE); FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Software Engineering; Android, data loss, test case generation, validation, mobile apps; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

Android apps must work correctly even if their execution is interrupted by external events. For instance, an app must work properly even if a phone call is received, or after its layout is redrawn because the smartphone has been rotated. Since these events may require destroying, when the execution is interrupted, and recreating, when the execution is resumed, the foreground activity of the app, the only way to prevent the loss of state information is saving and restoring it. This behavior must be explicitly implemented by app developers, who often miss to implement it properly, releasing apps affected by data loss problems, that is, apps that may lose state information when their execution is interrupted. Although several techniques can be used to automatically generate test cases for Android apps, the obtained test cases seldom include the interactions and the checks necessary to exercise and reveal data loss faults. To address this problem, this paper presents Data Loss Detector (DLD), a test case generation technique that integrates an exploration strategy, data-loss-revealing actions, and two customized oracle strategies for the detection of data loss failures. DLD has been able to reveal 75% of the faults in a benchmark of 54 Android app releases affected by 110 known data loss faults. DLD also revealed unknown data loss problems, outperforming competing approaches.<br/>for associated video presentation, see https://youtu.be/s6XZ7F8L3nY for associated slides, see https://www.slideshare.net/OlivieroRiganelli/oliviero-riganelli-data-loss-detector-automatically-revealing-data-loss-bugs-in-android-apps . In Proc. of the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2020)<br/>