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ANCHOR: locating android framework-specific crashing faults

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Abstract

Android framework-specific app crashes are hard to debug. Indeed, the callback-based event-driven mechanism of Android challenges crash localization techniques that are developed for traditional Java programs. The key challenge stems from the fact that the buggy code location may not even be listed within the stack trace. For example, our empirical study on 500 framework-specific crashes from an open benchmark has revealed that 37 percent of the crash types are related to bugs that are outside the stack traces. Moreover, Android programs are a mixture of code and extra-code artifacts such as the Manifest file. The fact that any artifact can lead to failures in the app execution creates the need to position the localization target beyond the code realm. In this paper, we propose Anchor , a two-phase suspicious bug location suggestion tool. Anchor specializes in finding crash-inducing bugs outside the stack trace. Anchor is lightweight and source code independent since it only requires the crash message and the apk file to locate the fault. Experimental results, collected via cross-validation and in-the-wild dataset evaluation, show that Anchor is effective in locating Android framework-specific crashing faults. Finally, we put our empirical study results openly accessible at https://github.com/anchor-locator/anchor.

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Notes

  1. Kotlin has also been widely used in recent years as an alternative for Android app development, it is designed to fully interoperate with Java.

  2. https://github.com/y20k/transistor/issues/21.

  3. Android framework methods are not visible or understandable to general developers, hence greater challenge is acknowledged for locating framework-specific crashes compared to developer-written methods. Fan et al. (2018b), Kong et al. (2019).

  4. https://developer.android.com/reference.

  5. https://stackoverflow.com.

  6. https://github.com.

  7. The Main Activity of an app is the first screen shown to the user when launched.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR), Luxembourg, under CORE projects CHARACTERIZE C17/IS/11693861 and RECOMMEND 15/IS/10449467, and AFR-PhD project 11620657.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Pingfan Kong, Jun Gao, Timothée Riom, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé & Jacques Klein

  2. Monash University, Clayton, Australia

    Li Li & Yanjie Zhao

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  1. Pingfan Kong
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  2. Li Li
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  4. Timothée Riom
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Correspondence to Li Li.

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Kong, P., Li, L., Gao, J. et al. ANCHOR: locating android framework-specific crashing faults. Autom Softw Eng 28, 10 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-021-00290-1

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