An Empirical Study on the Effectiveness of Monkey Testing for Android Applications

Android application development has attracted the attention of many software developers as a mainstream software platform. Despite its interesting characteristics, there are a number of issues that result in developing applications with poor performance. Hence, it is very crucial to evaluate quality of Android applications, specially their robustness and responsiveness. Monkey testing is a traditional technique used for testing these aspects in applications. In this paper, two experimental studies are conducted to investigate how effective monkey testing is in revealing robustness and responsiveness faults in Android applications. The results demonstrate that monkey testing of Android applications for finding robustness and responsiveness errors is very effective and highly recommended. Further, the Android applications published in Iranian app stores have turned out to be more vulnerable to these types of errors, compared to the applications published in international app stores. This means that robustness and responsiveness testing needs to be taken into consideration more seriously by the Iranian developers. The experimental results also demonstrate that the default monkey tool available in Android Studio IDE has a very low focus, i.e., 5.5%, and is much less sensitive to the responsiveness faults that cause delays less than 5 s.