Generating various contexts from permissions for testing Android applications

Context-awareness of mobile applications yields several issues for testing, since the mobile applications should be testable in any environment and with any contextual input. In previous studies of testing for Android applications as eventdriven systems, many researchers have focused on using the generated test cases considering only GUI events. However, it is difficult to detect failures in the changes in the context in which applications run. It is important to consider various contexts since the mobile applications adapt and use novel features and sensors of mobile devices. In this paper, we provide the method of systematically generating various executing contexts from permissions. By referring the lists of permissions, the resources that the applications use for running Android applications can be inferred easily. The various contexts of an application can be generated by permuting resource conditions, and the permutations of the contexts are prioritized. We have evaluated the usefulness and effectiveness of our method by showing that our method contributes to detect faults. Keywords—Android application testing, permissions, various contexts, context-aware application, mobile application testing