Aurora: Navigating UI Tarpits via Automated Neural Screen Understanding

Safwat Ali Khan, Wenyu Wang, Yiran Ren, Bin Zhu, Jiangfan Shi, Alyssa McGowan, Wing Lam, Kevin Moran

Abstract: Nearly a decade of research in software engineering has focused on automating mobile app testing to help engineers in overcoming the unique challenges associated with the software platform. Much of this work has come in the form of Automated Input Generation tools (AIG tools) that dynamically explore app screens. However, such tools have repeatedly been demonstrated to achieve lower-than-expected code coverage - particularly on sophisticated proprietary apps. Prior work has illustrated that a primary cause of these coverage deficiencies is related to so-called tarpits, or complex screens that are difficult to navigate. In this paper, we take a critical step toward enabling AIG tools to effectively navigate tarpits during app exploration through a new form of automated semantic screen understanding. That is, we introduce Aurora,a technique that learns from the visual and textual patterns that exist in mobile app UIs to automatically detect common screen designs and navigate them accordingly. The key idea of Aurorais that there are a finite number of mobile app screen designs, albeit with subtle variations, such that the general patterns of different categories of UI designs can be learned. As such, Auroraemploys a multi-modal, neural screen classifier that is able to recognize the most common types of UI screen designs. After recognizing a given screen, it then applies a set of flexible and generalizable heuristics to properly navigate the screen. We evaluated Auroraboth on a set of 12 apps with known tarpits from prior work, and on a new set of five of the most popular apps from the Google Play store. Our results indicate that Aurorais able to effectively navigate tarpit screens, outperforming prior approaches that avoid tarpits by 19.6% in terms of method coverage. Our analysis of the results finds that the improvements can be attributed to AURORA's VI design classification and heuristic navigation techniques.