Lifecycle and Event-Based Testing for Android Applications

Great work on “Lifecycle and Event-Based Testing for Android Applications” by Simone Graziussi, the student I’ve co-advised with Luciano Baresi.

Simone has written an excellent thesis that focussed on two particular challenges of mobile testing that have been largely overlooked to date, lifecycle management and event concurrency.

First of its kind, the approach presents static code analysis to recognize possible misuses of app components, and a dynamic technique that allows the developer to drive the application lifecycle to test its robustness.

His thesis develops an event-based testing approach that allows to observe several events during the application execution and to express consistency checks on their stream by means of a proposed temporal assertions language.

Together, the thesis forms a comprehensive framework to automating testing of events in Android applications, allowing to express existence, ordering, causality and quantification conditions on them, as well as to better control the critical lifecycle transitions.

P.S.: A concise view of the work is available in the poster presented at the Open House 2016 ¹ @ DEIB of the Politecnico di Milano.