Context-aware bug reproduction for mobile apps

Bug reports are vital for software maintenance that allow the developers being informed of the problems encountered in the software. Before bug fixing, developers need to reproduce the bugs which is an extremely time-consuming and tedious task, and it is highly expected to automate this process. However, it is challenging to do so considering the imprecise or incomplete natural language described in reproducing steps, and the missing or ambiguous single source of information in GUI components. In this paper, we propose a context-aware bug reproduction approach ScopeDroid which automatically reproduces crashes from textual bug reports for mobile apps. It first constructs a state transition graph (STG) and extracts the contextual information of components. We then design a multi-modal neural matching network to derive the fuzzy matching matrix between all candidate GUI events and reproducing steps. With the STG and matching information, it plans the exploration path for reproducing the bug, and enriches the initial STG iteratively. We evaluate the approach on 102 bug reports from 69 popular Android apps, and it successfully reproduces 63.7% of the crashes, outper-forming the state-of-the-art baselines by 32.6% and 38.3%. We also evaluate the usefulness and robustness of ScopeDroid with promising results. Furthermore, to train the neural matching network, we develop a heuristic-based automated training data generation method, which can potentially motivate and facilitate other activities as user interface operations.