PATS: A Parallel GUI Testing Framework for Android Applications

Android is currently the most widely used operating system for mobile devices. GUI testing for Android applications becomes an important research area in which many studies have been conducted. The past studies show that testing a complicated GUI design may need a large number of test cases which increases exponentially due to the complexity of the GUI. Developers then need to spend a large amount of testing time in executing the test cases to explore the potential software defects. Unfortunately, the testing efficiency issue has not been comprehensively discussed in related studies. In this paper, we describe a parallel GUI testing platform called PATS (Parallel Android Testing System) which performs GUI testing based on a master-slave model. In PATS, the application under test is analyzed dynamically under the cooperation of the master and the slaves. Since the test cases are also generated in parallel at the runtime, the testing efficiency can be improved. We have implemented a prototype and conducted experiments with Android apps. The experimental results show that PATS can effectively improve the testing time with 18.87-35.78% performance improvements.