An Innovative Testing Model Using Gene Mutation Technique for Android Applications

Abstract

Android applications have more new updates, sales, and downloads than any other mobile platform popularity of Android smartphones. These programs' enormous amount of code raises serious questions about the software's quality. Testing Android applications, nevertheless, owing to the distinctive program structure and new aspects of evaluating modern Java programs, Simple test coverage metrics like statement coverage are insufficient to guarantee excellent quality in apps. applications for Android. While academics are very interested in developing better Android testing techniques, there are yet no practical methods for analyzing their suggested test selection tactics. We predict that mutation analysis, which has been proven to be a successful method of designing tests in other software domains, is also a workable option for Android apps. This research suggests a novel mutation analysis strategy tailored to Android app development. We propose mutation variant operators particular to the features of Android apps, such as the inherent event-drivenness, the specialized Activity lifecycle structure, and the widespread usage of XML files to determine layout and behavior. We also discuss an empirical investigation we conducted to assess these variant operators. We have created a program that modifies the source code of Android apps using the innovative Android mutation operators, producing variants that can be deployed and used on Android platforms. Through an empirical investigation of real-world apps, we assessed the effectiveness of Android mutation testing. This work offers a large empirical investigation using real-world applications, introduces various unique variant operators derived from a error analysis of Android applications, and draws conclusions after analysing the findings. The findings demonstrate that the innovative Android variant techniques provide comprehensive testing for Android apps. We also highlight difficulties, opportunities, and future research areas to improve the performance of variant analysis for mobile apps since the application of mutation testing to Android apps is still in its infancy.