Automated Testing of Best Practices for Android

This tool analyzes and provides the feedback on an Android app, violating best practices. The analysis looks out for patterns that violate the best practices of Android and with respect to the violations generates log which helps the developer better understand their API usage. It logs the call stack of the Android API called to understand the class and method where the violation took place. The logs generated are also helpful for profiling and identifying bugs. The tool can also be used efficiently and with minimal efforts by users to examine the behavior of Android Apps.

To use this tool, you'll need to instrument the source code using Instrumentation_tool.

Follow step 1 "Establish build environment and Download Android source." from the User Guide document provided in the repository.

Steps to build customized emulator.

1. After completing the steps from Instrumentation_tool repository, paste these two files 'BestPracAspect.java' and 'Logging.java' under src/ folder.

2. 'BestPracAspect.java' contains all the aspect implementation of the Android API's which are considered to be the Best practices. 'Logging.java' has all the helper methods required to generate the log.

3. Initialize environment

$ export ANDROID_HOME = \<path to Working_Directory>  
$ source build/envsetup.sh  
$ lunch  

4. Build Android source

$ make showcommands

• To redirect logs to log file, run

$ make showcommands 2>&1 | tee log_file  

• To use multiple threads, run it with -j option as

$ make -j4

Note that, building the source may require up to 2-3 hours.

5. After build is successful, launch emulator using command:

$ emulator  

6. To see adb logs, use command:

$ adb logcat System.out:I *:S 

Sample applications

Two APK files are provided under the apks/ folder for you to understand the working of the tool. violatesBestPractice.apk this application violates the best practices and followsBestPractice.apk follows all the best practices.