ICTDroid: Parameter-Aware Combinatorial Testing for Components of Android Apps

Components are the fundamental building blocks of Android applications. Different functional modules represented by components often rely on inter-component communication mechanisms to achieve cross-module data transfer and method invocation. It is necessary to conduct robustness testing on components to prevent component launching crashes and privacy leaks caused by unexpected input parameters. However, as the complexity of the input parameter structure and the diversity of possible inputs, developers may overlook specific inputs that result in exceptions. At the same time, the vast input space also brings challenges to efficient component testing. In this paper, we designed an automated test generation and execution tool for Android application components named ICTDroid, which combines static parameter extraction and adaptive-strength combinatorial testing generation to detect bugs with a compact test suite. Experiments have shown that the tool triggers 205 unique exceptions in 30 open-source applications with 1,919 test cases in 83 minutes, where the developers have confirmed six defects in three issues we reported.