Master’s Thesis Presentation • Software Engineering • Simplifying Crash-Triggering Event Sequence for Android Apps

Please note: This master’s thesis presentation will take place in DC 2310 and online.

Aryan Haddady, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Supervisor: Professor Chengnian Sun

Test input minimization, which is minimizing the size of a test input without losing any important outcome such as the emergence of a crash, has been a subject of extensive research, due to its importance in the facilitation of the debugging process. A notable proposed approach is Delta Debugging in which the portions of the input are iteratively removed to see which portions are responsible for the crash. After the introduction of Delta Debugging, several enhancements have been suggested for the Delta Debugging algorithm, including Hierarchical Delta Debugging (HDD) and Balanced Hierarchical Delta Debugging (BHDD). These algorithms operate on hierarchical event series and improve the speed of Delta Debugging by applying it at each level rather than on the whole series. In this work, the HDD and BHDD algorithms were implemented on an Android automatic GUI testing tool named APE. The tool demonstrated its ability to reduce the gathered traces to significantly shorter traces without the disappearance of the original crash.

To attend this master’s thesis presentation in person, please go to DC 2310. You can also attend virtually using Zoom at https://uwaterloo.zoom.us/j/95861365604.