Clustering Crowdsourced Test Reports of Mobile Applications Using Image Understanding

Crowdsourced testing has been widely used to improve software quality as it can detect various bugs and simulate real usage scenarios. Crowdsourced workers perform tasks on crowdsourcing platforms and present their experiences as test reports, which naturally generates an overwhelming number of test reports. Therefore, inspecting these reports becomes a time-consuming yet inevitable task. In recent years, many text-based prioritization and clustering techniques have been proposed to address this challenge. However, in mobile testing, test reports often consist of only short test descriptions but rich screenshots. Compared with the uncertainty of textual information, well-defined screenshots can often adequately express the mobile application’s activity views. In this paper, by employing image-understanding techniques, we propose an approach for clustering crowdsourced test reports of mobile applications based on both textual and image features to assist the inspection procedure. We employ Spatial Pyramid Matching (SPM) to measure the similarity of the screenshots and use the natural-language-processing techniques to compute the textual distance of test reports. To validate our approach, we conducted an experiment on 6 industrial crowdsourced projects that contain more than 1600 test reports and 1400 screenshots. The results show that our approach is capable of outperforming the baselines by up to 37 percent regarding the APFD metric. Further, we analyze the parameter sensitivity of our approach and discuss the settings for different application scenarios.