Presentation at ASE 2025
The IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) is a premier research forum that brings together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to present and discuss foundations, methods, and tools for automating the analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance of large software systems.
At ASE 2025 in Seoul, Republic of Korea, Jakob Bleier, Felix Kehrer**, Jürgen Cito, and Martina Lindorfer presented their paper “Profile Coverage: Using Android Compilation Profiles to Evaluate Dynamic Testing.” Their work addresses a key challenge in Android security and reliability: as apps grow more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to test them in a way that reflects how real users interact with them.
The team shows that Android’s compilation profiles — particularly Cloud Profiles from the Google Play Store — offer a valuable, previously underused view of real-world usage. They introduce profile coverage, a new metric that measures how well dynamic testing exercises the methods users actually trigger, and implement it with PROFTRACE, a lightweight tracer based on Linux kernel uprobes that runs without modifying apps or the Android system. Evaluations on popular apps demonstrate that profile coverage uncovers insights beyond traditional code coverage and opens up new opportunities for user-centric testing, app understanding, and future research on usage-informed analysis of Android software.
