Flaky Test Detection Based on Adaptive Latest Position Execution for Concurrent Android Applications

Abstract

Tests may pass or fail under the same conditions. These tests are commonly known as flaky tests. In Android applications, the primary reason for flaky tests is attributed to its event-driven programming paradigm and multi-threading concurrency mechanism. It may activate an unexpected event order when a test is executed, causing test flakiness. The later the execution of asynchronous events, the more likely it is to result in test flakiness. Inspired by this deduction, this paper puts forward a flaky test detection method for concurrent Android applications based on adaptive latest position execution. In more detail, the latest execution positions of each asynchronous event are identified by analyzing the sequential dependencies between events. On this basis, the asynchronous event is scheduled at the corresponding position, thereby trying to change the test results and detecting flaky tests. To validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach, a series of experiments are conducted on 16 known flaky test cases across 7 Android applications. The experimental results show that compared with the state-of-the-art tool FlakeScanner, the flaky test detection rate of our approach improves by 18.75%.