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FuncDroid: Towards Inter-Functional Flows for Comprehensive Mobile App GUI Testing

Jinlong He, Changwei Xia, Binru Huang, Jiwei Yan, Jun Yan, Jian Zhang

TL;DR

This work designs a Functional Flow Graph (FFG), a behavioral model that explicitly captures an app's functional units and their inter-functional interactions, and introduces an inter-functional-flow-oriented GUI testing approach with the dual goals of precise model construction and deep bug detection.

Abstract

As mobile application (app) functionalities grow increasingly complex and their iterations accelerate, ensuring high reliability presents significant challenges. While functionality-oriented GUI testing has attracted growing research attention, existing approaches largely overlook interactions across functionalities, making them ineffective at uncovering deep bugs hidden in inter-functional behaviors. To fill this gap, we first design a Functional Flow Graph (FFG), a behavioral model that explicitly captures an app's functional units and their inter-functional interactions. Based on the FFG, we further introduce an inter-functional-flow-oriented GUI testing approach with the dual goals of precise model construction and deep bug detection. This approach is realized through a long-short-term-view-guided testing process. By combining two complementary test-generation views, it can adaptively refine functional boundaries and systematically explore inter-functional flows under diverse triggering conditions. We implement our approach in a tool called FuncDroid, and evaluate it on two benchmarks: (1) a widely-used open-source benchmark with 50 reproducible crash bugs and (2) a diverse set of 52 popular commercial apps. Experimental results demonstrate that FuncDroid significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both coverage (+28%) and bug detection number (+107%). Moreover, FuncDroid successfully uncovers 18 previously unknown non-crash functional bugs in commercial apps, confirming its practical effectiveness.

FuncDroid: Towards Inter-Functional Flows for Comprehensive Mobile App GUI Testing

TL;DR

This work designs a Functional Flow Graph (FFG), a behavioral model that explicitly captures an app's functional units and their inter-functional interactions, and introduces an inter-functional-flow-oriented GUI testing approach with the dual goals of precise model construction and deep bug detection.

Abstract

As mobile application (app) functionalities grow increasingly complex and their iterations accelerate, ensuring high reliability presents significant challenges. While functionality-oriented GUI testing has attracted growing research attention, existing approaches largely overlook interactions across functionalities, making them ineffective at uncovering deep bugs hidden in inter-functional behaviors. To fill this gap, we first design a Functional Flow Graph (FFG), a behavioral model that explicitly captures an app's functional units and their inter-functional interactions. Based on the FFG, we further introduce an inter-functional-flow-oriented GUI testing approach with the dual goals of precise model construction and deep bug detection. This approach is realized through a long-short-term-view-guided testing process. By combining two complementary test-generation views, it can adaptively refine functional boundaries and systematically explore inter-functional flows under diverse triggering conditions. We implement our approach in a tool called FuncDroid, and evaluate it on two benchmarks: (1) a widely-used open-source benchmark with 50 reproducible crash bugs and (2) a diverse set of 52 popular commercial apps. Experimental results demonstrate that FuncDroid significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both coverage (+28%) and bug detection number (+107%). Moreover, FuncDroid successfully uncovers 18 previously unknown non-crash functional bugs in commercial apps, confirming its practical effectiveness.
Paper Structure (18 sections, 9 figures, 3 tables)

This paper contains 18 sections, 9 figures, 3 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Motivating Example
  3. Approach of FuncDroid
  4. Definition of Functional Flow Graph
  5. Inter-Functional-Flow-oriented GUI Testing
  6. Functional Flow Graph Initializing
  7. Long-Short-Term View (LSTV) Exploration
  8. (1) Long-Term View Test Scenario Generation.
  9. (2) Short-Term View Test Scenario Generation.
  10. (3) Scenario‑driven Bug Detection
  11. Functional Flow Graph Updating
  12. Evaluation
  13. Experimental Setup
  14. Effectiveness and Efficiency
  15. Ablation Study
  16. ...and 3 more sections

Figures (9)

  • Figure 1: Two Functional Bugs in the Motivating App Blood Pressure.
  • Figure 2: Overview of FuncDroid
  • Figure 3: FFG Initialization of the Blood Pressure App.
  • Figure 4: Example of LTV Test Scenario for Refining Functionality Definitions.
  • Figure 5: Example of LTV Test Scenario for Refining Flow Conditions.
  • ...and 4 more figures