Is this the lifecycle we really want?: an automated black-box testing approach for Android activities

Android is today the world's most popular mobile operating system and the demand for quality to Android mobile apps has grown together with their spread. Testing is a well-known approach for assuring the quality of software applications but Android apps have several peculiarities compared to traditional software applications that have to be taken into account by testers. Several studies have pointed out that mobile apps suffer from issues that can be attributed to Activity lifecycle mishandling, e.g. crashes, hangs, waste of system resources. Therefore the lifecycle of the Activities composing an app should be properly considered by testing approaches. In this paper we propose ALARic, a fully automated Black-Box Event-based testing technique that explores an application under test for detecting issues tied to the Android Activity lifecycle. ALARic has been implemented in a tool. We conducted an experiment involving 15 real Android apps that showed the effectiveness of ALARic in finding GUI failures and crashes tied to the Activity lifecycle. In the study, ALARic proved to be more effective in detecting crashes than Monkey, the state-of-the practice automated Android testing tool.