Nondeterministic Event Sequence Reduction for Android Applications

Crowdsourced testing is also effective to expose errors within the applications under test. This is because crowdsourced testers can exercise the application in more realistic scenarios with input close to that of end users. However, when a fault is triggered, the corresponding input event sequence can be long and non-deterministic. This makes it hard to reproduce the failure efficiently, which is crucial for effective debugging. While traditional delta debugging techniques can effectively reduce the length of event sequence, it will not work well when such event sequence is non-deterministic during execution. In this work, we proposed to integrate the delta debugging technique with a deterministic replay tool to address this problem. The results show that our tool can effectively reduce non-deterministic event sequence with high successful rate. In contract, most of the non-deterministic event sequences cannot be reduced with traditional delta debugging techniques.