Systematic testing for resource leaks in Android applications

Abstract

The use of mobile devices and the complexity of their software continue to grow rapidly. This growth presents significant challenges for software correctness and performance. In addition to traditional defects, a key consideration are defects related to the limited resources available on these devices. Resource leaks in an application, due to improper management of resources, can lead to slowdowns, crashes, and negative user experience. Despite a large body of existing work on leak detection, testing for resource leaks remains a challenging problem. We propose a novel and comprehensive approach for systematic testing for resource leaks in Android software. Similar to existing testing techniques, the approach is based on a GUI model, but is focused specifically on coverage criteria aimed at resource leak defects. These criteria are based on neutral cycles: sequences of GUI events that should have a “neutral” effect and should not lead to increases in resource usage. Several important categories of neutral cycles are considered in the proposed test coverage criteria. Experimental evaluation and case studies were performed on eight Android applications. The approach exposed 18 resource leak defects, 12 of which were previously unknown. These results provide motivation for future work on analysis, testing, and prevention of resource leaks in Android software.