Automatically Testing Android Applications Based On Graphic Comparison Algorithm

As Android system widely applied on the mobile devices, large quantities of Android applications are developed, and emerge in the market. However, in practice, for lack of the specification about how to develop and test Android application effectively, many Android applications are not tested well and not qualified. The low quality of the application is not conducive to the development of the entire ecological chain in Android.Traditional automated testing methods cannot extract the unknown functionality of the application. The Android application stores have to validate applications by manual black-box functional testing. The manual checking which lack enough efficiency can’t meet the requirements of testing the increasing applications in the Android application stores. Hence, an automatic test technology is needed badly for application stores.To address this problem, this paper proposes and implements an automatic UI testing tool which is based on graphic comparison algorithm. Evaluation shows that the tool can automatically cover and test all functionality points of the target Android application. Furthermore, application stores can save time and improve the testing efficiency greatly with the automatic testing tool in practice. On the average, the testing tool achieves100%correctness and93.8%coverage of function points in common cases for functionality testing of Android applications. This paper makes the following contributions:1. Propose a new UI testing tool for application store to test applications automatically.2. By using graphic comparison algorithm, the UI testing tool can recognize the function points of Android application automatically.3. Propose an interface graph traversal algorithm, which can basically achieve the complete traversal of all functions in the application.4. Improve the performance of the automatic UI testing tool greatly by the optimization of UI tree. The daily Test efficiency of UI testing tool is3.97X of manual checking, which is further better in parallel mode.