{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,4]],"date-time":"2026-02-04T20:45:52Z","timestamp":1770237952473,"version":"3.49.0"},"reference-count":55,"publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)","issue":"FSE","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2024,7,12]],"date-time":"2024-07-12T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1720742400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"http:\/\/www.acm.org\/publications\/policies\/copyright_policy#Background"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/100000001","name":"National Science Foundation","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["2211454"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2211454"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100000001","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Proc. ACM Softw. Eng."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2024,7,12]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>Bug report reproduction is an important, but time-consuming task carried out during mobile app maintenance. To accelerate this task, current research has proposed automated reproduction techniques that rely on a guided dynamic exploration of the app to match bug report steps with UI events in a mobile app. However, these techniques struggle to find the correct match when the bug reports have missing or inaccurately described steps. To address these limitations, we propose a new bug report reproduction technique that uses an app\u2019s UI model to perform a global search across all possible matches between steps and UI actions and identify the most likely match while accounting for the possibility of missing or inaccurate steps. To do this, our approach redefines the bug report reproduction process as a Markov model and finds the best paths through the model using a dynamic programming based technique. We conducted an empirical evaluation on 72 real-world bug reports. Our approach achieved a 94% reproduction rate on the total bug reports and a 93% reproduction rate on bug reports with missing steps, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art approaches. Our approach was also more effective in finding the matches from the steps to UI events than the state-of-the-art approaches.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3660824","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2024,7,12]],"date-time":"2024-07-12T10:22:09Z","timestamp":1720779729000},"page":"2656-2676","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":4,"title":["Mobile Bug Report Reproduction via Global Search on the App UI Model"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"1","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1333-1637","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Zhaoxu","family":"Zhang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-4757-4170","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Fazle Mohammed","family":"Tawsif","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0005-0199-3424","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Komei","family":"Ryu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-9461-4251","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Tingting","family":"Yu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-4951-9367","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"William G. J.","family":"Halfond","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2024,7,12]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_1_2_2","unstructured":"2015. App Crawler. https:\/\/github.com\/Eaway\/AppCrawler."},{"key":"e_1_3_1_3_2","unstructured":"2017. IllegalArgumentException: unexpected url. https:\/\/github.com\/samuelclay\/NewsBlur\/issues\/1053."},{"key":"e_1_3_1_4_2","unstructured":"2019. Accessing General settings form Admin settings does not display disabled submenus. https:\/\/github.com\/getodk\/collect\/issues\/2958."},{"key":"e_1_3_1_5_2","unstructured":"2023. Android Accessibility. https:\/\/support.google.com\/accessibility\/android\/answer\/7158690?hl=en."},{"key":"e_1_3_1_6_2","unstructured":"2023. Favourite photos edit option issue. https:\/\/github.com\/fossasia\/phimpme-android\/issues\/1858."},{"key":"e_1_3_1_7_2","unstructured":"2023. Github Issue Tracker. https:\/\/github.com\/issues."},{"key":"e_1_3_1_8_2","unstructured":"2023. Google Code Issue Tracker. https:\/\/code.google.com\/archive\/."},{"key":"e_1_3_1_9_2","unstructured":"2023. Neo4j Graph Database and Analytics. https:\/\/neo4j.com\/."},{"key":"e_1_3_1_10_2","unstructured":"2023. Spacy: Industrial-Strength Natural Language Processing. https:\/\/spacy.io\/models."},{"key":"e_1_3_1_11_2","unstructured":"2023. UI Automator. https:\/\/developer.android.com\/training\/testing\/ui-automator."},{"key":"e_1_3_1_12_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","unstructured":"2024. Replication Package. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.5281\/ZENODO.11068809 10.5281\/ZENODO.11068809","DOI":"10.5281\/ZENODO.11068809"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_13_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2970276.2970313"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_14_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1515\/9781400835386"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_15_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3377811.3380328"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_16_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/CSMR.2013.23"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_17_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3338906.3338947"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_18_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3106237.3106285"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_19_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/ICSE.2019.00070"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_20_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.3115\/v1\/D14-1179"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_21_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/ICSE43902.2021.00091"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_22_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","unstructured":"E. W. Dijkstra . 1959. A Note on Two Problems in Connexion with Graphs. Numer. Math. 1 1 (dec 1959) 269-271. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/BF01386390 10.1007\/BF01386390","DOI":"10.1007\/BF01386390"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_23_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2597073.2597098"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_24_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/TSE.2022.3174028"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_25_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3213846.3213869"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_26_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3510003.3510048"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_27_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/ICSE.2019.00042"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_28_2","volume-title":"Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE)","author":"Halfond William G.J.","year":"2008","unstructured":"William G.J. Halfond . 2008. Web Application Modeling for Testing and Analysis. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), Doctoral Symposium."},{"key":"e_1_3_1_29_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3387904.3389263"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_30_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/s10664-015-9387-3"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_31_2","volume-title":"2023 IEEE\/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)","author":"Huang Yuchao","year":"2023","unstructured":"Yuchao Huang, Junjie Wang, Liu Zhe, Song Wang, Chunyang Chen, Mingyang Li, and Qing Wang. 2023. Context-aware Bug Reproduction for Mobile Apps. In 2023 IEEE\/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). IEEE, Melbourne, Australia."},{"key":"e_1_3_1_32_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/SANER53432.2022.00048"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_33_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2597073.2597128"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_34_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3510003.3510037"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_35_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3395363.3397355"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_36_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3491102.3501903"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_37_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-1-4471-3267-7"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_38_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","unstructured":"Tomas Mikolov Kai Chen Greg Corrado and Jeffrey Dean. 2013. Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.48550\/arXiv.1301.3781 10.48550\/arXiv.1301.3781 arXiv:1301.3781 [cs].","DOI":"10.48550\/arXiv.1301.3781"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_39_2","unstructured":"Tomas Mikolov Ilya Sutskever Kai Chen Greg S Corrado and Jeff Dean. 2013. Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality. In Proceedings ofthe 26th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems - Volume 2. Curran Associates Inc. Red Hook NY USA 9."},{"key":"e_1_3_1_40_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/ICSE-C.2017.16"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_41_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2786805.2786857"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_42_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/ICSE.2007.32"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_43_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1806799.1806870"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_44_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/QRS.2016.28"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_45_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3540250.3549131"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_46_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3106237.3106298"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_47_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1806799.1806811"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_48_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1368088.1368151"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_49_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/MSR52588.2021.00082"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_50_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-642-37057-1_19"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_51_2","article-title":"Automatically Reproducing Android Bug Reports Using Natural Language Processing and Reinforcement Learning","author":"Zhang Zhaoxu","year":"2023","unstructured":"Zhaoxu Zhang, Robert Winn, Yu Zhao, Tingting Yu, and William G.J Halfond. 2023. Automatically Reproducing Android Bug Reports Using Natural Language Processing and Reinforcement Learning. In Proceedings ofthe International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2023).","journal-title":"Proceedings ofthe International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2023)"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_52_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3488244"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_53_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/ICSE.2019.00030"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_54_2","article-title":"ReCDroid: Automatically Reproducing Android Application Crashes from Bug Reports","author":"Yu Zhao","year":"2019","unstructured":"Yu Zhao, Tingting Yu, Ting Su, Yang Liu, Wei Zheng, Jingzhi Zhang, and William G.J. Halfond. 2019. ReCDroid: Automatically Reproducing Android Application Crashes from Bug Reports. In Proceedings of the ACM\/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).","journal-title":"In Proceedings of the ACM\/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)."},{"key":"e_1_3_1_55_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3551349.3556894"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_56_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/TSE.2010.63"}],"container-title":["Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/3660824","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.1145\/3660824","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"syndication"},{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.1145\/3660824","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,4]],"date-time":"2026-02-04T07:57:12Z","timestamp":1770191832000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/3660824"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2024,7,12]]},"references-count":55,"journal-issue":{"issue":"FSE","published-print":{"date-parts":[[2024,7,12]]}},"alternative-id":["10.1145\/3660824"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/3660824","relation":{},"ISSN":["2994-970X"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2994-970X","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2024,7,12]]}}}