ReCDroid: Automatically Reproducing Android Application Crashes from Bug Reports

Yu Zhao; Tingting Yu; Ting Su; Yang Liu; Wei Zheng; Jingzhi Zhang; William Halfond

doi:10.1109/ICSE.2019.00030

ReCDroid: Automatically Reproducing Android Application Crashes from Bug Reports

Yu Zhao, Tingting Yu, Ting Su, Yang Liu, Wei Zheng, Jingzhi Zhang, William Halfond

Computer Science

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › peer-review

82 Scopus citations

Abstract

The large demand of mobile devices creates significant concerns about the quality of mobile applications (apps). Developers heavily rely on bug reports in issue tracking systems to reproduce failures (e.g., crashes). However, the process of crash reproduction is often manually done by developers, making the resolution of bugs inefficient, especially that bug reports are often written in natural language. To improve the productivity of developers in resolving bug reports, in this paper, we introduce a novel approach, called ReCDroid, that can automatically reproduce crashes from bug reports for Android apps. ReCDroid uses a combination of natural language processing (NLP) and dynamic GUI exploration to synthesize event sequences with the goal of reproducing the reported crash. We have evaluated ReCDroid on 51 original bug reports from 33 Android apps. The results show that ReCDroid successfully reproduced 33 crashes (63.5% success rate) directly from the textual description of bug reports. A user study involving 12 participants demonstrates that ReCDroid can improve the productivity of developers when resolving crash bug reports.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Proceedings - 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2019
Pages	128-139
Number of pages	12
ISBN (Electronic)	9781728108698
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00030
State	Published - May 2019
Event	41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2019 - Montreal, Canada Duration: May 25 2019 → May 31 2019

Publication series

Name	Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
Volume	2019-May
ISSN (Print)	0270-5257

Conference

Conference	41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2019
Country/Territory	Canada
City	Montreal
Period	5/25/19 → 5/31/19

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 IEEE.

Keywords

Android
Bug reproduction
Natural language processing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Software

Access to Document

10.1109/ICSE.2019.00030

Cite this

Zhao, Y., Yu, T., Su, T., Liu, Y., Zheng, W., Zhang, J., & Halfond, W. (2019). ReCDroid: Automatically Reproducing Android Application Crashes from Bug Reports. In Proceedings - 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2019 (pp. 128-139). Article 8811942 (Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering; Vol. 2019-May). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00030

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title = "ReCDroid: Automatically Reproducing Android Application Crashes from Bug Reports",

abstract = "The large demand of mobile devices creates significant concerns about the quality of mobile applications (apps). Developers heavily rely on bug reports in issue tracking systems to reproduce failures (e.g., crashes). However, the process of crash reproduction is often manually done by developers, making the resolution of bugs inefficient, especially that bug reports are often written in natural language. To improve the productivity of developers in resolving bug reports, in this paper, we introduce a novel approach, called ReCDroid, that can automatically reproduce crashes from bug reports for Android apps. ReCDroid uses a combination of natural language processing (NLP) and dynamic GUI exploration to synthesize event sequences with the goal of reproducing the reported crash. We have evaluated ReCDroid on 51 original bug reports from 33 Android apps. The results show that ReCDroid successfully reproduced 33 crashes (63.5% success rate) directly from the textual description of bug reports. A user study involving 12 participants demonstrates that ReCDroid can improve the productivity of developers when resolving crash bug reports.",

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Zhao, Y, Yu, T, Su, T, Liu, Y, Zheng, W, Zhang, J & Halfond, W 2019, ReCDroid: Automatically Reproducing Android Application Crashes from Bug Reports. in Proceedings - 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2019., 8811942, Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering, vol. 2019-May, pp. 128-139, 41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2019, Montreal, Canada, 5/25/19. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00030

ReCDroid: Automatically Reproducing Android Application Crashes from Bug Reports. / Zhao, Yu; Yu, Tingting; Su, Ting et al.
Proceedings - 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2019. 2019. p. 128-139 8811942 (Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering; Vol. 2019-May).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › peer-review

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AU - Zhang, Jingzhi

AU - Halfond, William

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ReCDroid: Automatically Reproducing Android Application Crashes from Bug Reports

Abstract

Publication series

Conference

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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