An Empirical Study on Common Sense-Violating Bugs in Mobile Apps

Mobile applications are widely used by billions of users in their daily work and life. Such GUI software is prone to bugs, potentially degrading user experience. Notably, many bugs in mobile apps are reported by end-users who cannot access the requirements of the app or test cases accompanied by explicitly specified test oracles. It may suggest that such bugs are not identified in the traditional way, i.e., by comparing the actual behaviors of the apps against their expected behaviors explicitly specified in the requirements or test cases. Instead, such bugs are often identified by comparing the actual behaviors against users’ common knowledge of apps, noted as common sense. We refer to such bugs as common sense-violating bugs. Although it is well-known that common sense-violating bugs are common in mobile apps, it remains unclear how popular they are and what kind of common sense principles are violated by them, let alone the relationship among the violated common sense principles. To this end, in this paper, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study on common sense-violating bugs in open-source mobile apps. We manually analyzed 2,808 real-world bug reports across 948 open-sourced mobile apps on GitHub. Our analysis results suggest that 1,006 (35.8%) out of the 2,808 bugs pertain to common sense-violating bugs. From those common sense-violating bugs, we identified a set of common sense principles violated by the buggy behaviors, and built a taxonomy for the common sense principles. Such principles fall into three categories: UI content-related common sense principles, UI layout-related common sense principles, and interaction-related common sense principles. By analyzing the frequency of the common sense principles being violated, we observed that a small set of common sense principles were frequently violated by the majority of common sense-violating bugs: 18 common sense principles, accounting for only 5% of the violated common sense principles, were violated by more than half of the common sense-violating bugs. These findings suggest that identifying the most frequent common sense-violating bugs could be achieved by using a small set of critical common sense principles, which may significantly reduce the cost of common sense-based bug detection. Finally, to demonstrate the feasibility of automated bug detection with common sense-based test oracles, we propose an automated approach to validating whether a given test run violates the most frequently violated common sense principle: No raw error message. Our evaluation results suggest that the automated approach is accurate, whose precision and recall are 91.3% and 91.6%, respectively.