Writing and maintaining UI tests for mobile apps is a time-consuming and tedious task. While decades of research have produced auto- mated approaches for UI test generation, these approaches typically focus on testing for crashes or maximizing code coverage. By contrast, recent research has shown that developers prefer usage-based tests, which center around specific uses of app features, to help support activities such as regression testing. Very few existing techniques support the generation of such tests, as doing so requires automating the difficult task of understanding the semantics of UI screens and user inputs. In this paper, we introduce Avgust, which automates key steps of generating usage-based tests. Avgust uses neural models for image understanding to process video recordings of app uses to synthesize an app-agnostic state-machine encoding of those uses. Then, Avgust uses this encoding to synthesize test cases for a new target app. We evaluate Avgust on 374 videos of common uses of 18 popular apps and show that 69% of the tests Avgust generates successfully execute the desired usage, and that Avgust’s classifiers outperform the state of the art.

Writing UI tests manually requires significant effort. Several approaches have tried to address this problem in mobile apps: by exploiting the similarities of different apps within the same domain on a single platform, they have shown that it is possible to transfer tests that exercise similar functionality between the apps. A related recent technique enables transfer of UI tests uni-directionally, from an open-source iOS app to the same app implemented for Android. This paper presents MAPIT, a technique that expands existing work in three important ways: (1) it enables bi-directional UI test transfer between pairs of "sibling" Android and iOS apps; (2) it does not assume that the apps’ source code is available; (3) it is capable of transferring tests containing oracles in addition to UI events. MAPIT runs existing tests on a "source" app and builds a partial model of the app corresponding to each test. The model comprises the app’s screenshots, obtainable properties of each screenshot’s constituent elements, and labeled transitions between the screenshots. MAPIT uses this model to determine the corresponding information on the "target" app and generates an equivalent test, via a novel approach that leverages computer vision and NLP. Our evaluation on a diverse set of widely used, closed-source sibling Android and iOS apps shows that MAPIT is feasible, accurate, and useful in transferring UI tests across platforms.

This paper presents AirMochi, a tool that provides remote access and control of apps by leveraging a mobile platform's publicly exported accessibility features. While AirMochi is designed to be platform-independent, we discuss its iOS implementation. We show that AirMochi places no restrictions on apps, is able to handle a variety of scenarios, and imposes a negligible performance overhead. https://youtu.be/rhPz2Hs4Ius https://github.com/nkllkc/air_mochi