Artisan: An Action-Based Test Carving Tool for Android Apps

Android app developers should take advantage of end-to-end tests to validate user flows and unit tests to perform focused debugging activities. While there is considerable tool support for creating end-to-end tests in the form of GUI tests, Android app developers lack automated support for creating unit tests, in particular, unit tests that run on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). These tests are complex to create, as there is a need to suitably handle the coupling between the app under test (AUT) and the Android framework while creating the tests.To help Android app developers create unit tests that run on the JVM, we present a tool called ARTISAN. The tool uses the idea of test carving to create unit tests from GUI tests. Specifically, ARTISAN traces method invocations in the AUT during GUI testing and then creates focused unit tests that replicate the behavior of executed methods. We used 152 end-to-end tests from five apps to perform an empirical evaluation of ARTISAN and the tool was able to generate unit tests that cover a significant portion of the code exercised by the GUI tests (i.e., 45% of the initial GUI-test-based statement coverage on average). ARTISAN and its related experimental data are publicly available at https://github.com/se-umn/artisan. We provide a video demo of the tool at https://youtu.be/pRhVAhquPGk.