Testing for poor responsiveness in android applications

Abstract

An important category of defects in Android applications are related to poor responsiveness. When the user interface thread performs expensive operations, the application is sluggish and may fail with an “Application Not Responding” error. Poor responsiveness has serious negative consequences for user perception and marketplace success. We propose a systematic technique to uncover and quantify common causes of poor responsiveness in Android software. When test cases are executed against the application GUI, artificial long delays are inserted at typical problematic operations (e.g., at calls that access the network). This test amplification approach may exhibit increased response times for GUI events, which demonstrates the effects of expensive operations on poor responsiveness observed by the user. The proposed approach successfully uncovered 61 responsiveness problems in eight open-source Android applications, due to inappropriate usage of resources such as network, flash storage, on-device database, and bitmaps.