Impact of Execution Modes on Finding Android Failures

The iMPAcT tool combines the benefits of existing user recurring behaviour (User Interface Patterns) on mobile applications to facilitate the test automation of Android mobile applications. It uses an automatic exploration process combined with reverse engineering to identify the existing user interface patterns on a mobile application and then tests those patterns with generic test strategies (designated Test Patterns). The Test Patterns are defined in a catalogue that can be reused for testing other applications. However the results obtained by the iMPAcT tool depend on the exploration mode and on the order in which the test strategies are applied. This paper describes an experiment conducted to evaluate the impact of using different exploration modes and of changing the order by which UI patterns are searched and subsequently tested on the failures found and on the number of events fired.