Testing Android Applications Considering Various Contexts Inferred from Permissions

The context-awareness of mobile applications yields several issues for testing, since mobile applications should be able to be tested in any environment and under any contextual input. In previous studies of testing for Android applications as an event-driven system, many researchers have focused on using generated test cases considering only Graphical User Interface (GUI) events. However, it is difficult to find failures that could be detected when considering the changes in the context in which applications run. It is even more important to consider various contexts since the mobile applications adapt and use the new features and sensors of mobile devices. In this paper, we provide a method of systematically generating various executing contexts from permissions. By referring to the lists of permissions, the resources used by the applications for running Android applications can be easily inferred. To evaluate the efficiency of our testing method, we applied the method on two open source projects and showed that it contributes to improve the statement code coverage.