Bug report reproduction is a crucial but time-consuming task to be carried out during mobile app maintenance. To accelerate this process, researchers have developed automated techniques for reproducing mobile app bug reports. However, due to the lack of an effective mechanism to recognize different buggy behaviors described in the report, existing work is limited to reproducing crash bug reports, or requires developers to manually analyze execution traces to determine if a bug was successfully reproduced. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel technique to automatically identify and extract the buggy behavior from the bug report and detect it during the automated reproduction process. To accommodate various buggy behaviors of mobile app bugs, we conducted an empirical study and created a standardized representation for expressing the bug behavior identified from our study. Given a report, our approach first transforms the documented buggy behavior into this standardized representation, then matches it against real-time device and UI information during the reproduction to recognize the bug. Our empirical evaluation demonstrated that our approach achieved over 90% precision and recall in generating the standardized representation of buggy behaviors. It correctly identified bugs in 83% of the bug reports and enhanced existing reproduction techniques, allowing them to reproduce four times more bug reports. 
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                            ReCDroid+: Automated End-to-End Crash Reproduction from Bug Reports for Android Apps
                        
                    
    
            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 given 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) , deep learning, and dynamic GUI exploration to synthesize event sequences with the goal of reproducing the reported crash. We have evaluated ReCDroid+ on 66 original bug reports from 37 Android apps. The results show that ReCDroid+ successfully reproduced 42 crashes (63.6% success rate) directly from the textual description of the manually reproduced 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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                            - Award ID(s):
- 2152340
- PAR ID:
- 10417711
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
- Volume:
- 31
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1049-331X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 33
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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