تحقیق تجربی از تریگر های خطادار در سیستم عامل اندروید An Empirical Investigation of Fault Triggers in Android Operating System

I. INTRODUCTION As the number of useful and convenient applications in smartphones is increasing, more and more people prefer to use their smartphones for entertainment and daily activities. Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world, with hundreds of millions of mobile devices distributed among more than 190 countries [1]. Along with its wide application, many studies concentrate on its security [2], memory [3], power consuming [4], bugs [5], etc. In this paper, we analyze the Android operating system from the viewpoint of bugs. Previous studies on bugs in Android mainly focused on bug locations in modules and their persistence, code modification [5], duplicate bug detection [6], [7], or bug changes [8], etc. Although the fruits present good results for the understanding of bugs in Android, the distribution of bug types in this operating system and the relationship between the bug types and bug attributes are significant topics deserved to be studied, which has not been fully explored till now. Several bug classification methods have been conducted based on bug manifestations. For example, Gray [9] classified bugs into Bohrbugs and Heisenbugs according to the principle whether corresponding failures can be systematically reproduced or not. Grottke et al. [10] defined Mandelbugs as the complementary antonym of Bohrbugs. Due to the simplicity of the activation and error propagation of a Bohrbug, its failure reproduction and hence isolating are easy to be processed. Comparatively the activation and/or error propagation of a Mandelbug are complex – the complexity may be induced by the time lag between bug activation and the failure occurrence, interactions of the software application with its system-internal environment, the timing of inputs and operations, and the sequencing of operations. Different from Bohrbugs, Mandelbugs could make system exhibit chaotic or even nondeterministic behavior during operation [11]. Furthermore, Mandelbugs can be divided into aging related Bugs (ARB) and non-aging related Mandelbugs (NAM). ARBs refer to bugs that can result in software aging (a phenomenon that software exhibits an increasing failure rate and/or degrading performance in a long-running software system). Based on above classification, Cotroneo et al. [12] proposed an extensive analysis of fault triggers. Several researchers have analyzed the manifestation characteristics of each type of bugs in popular software systems, like Apache HTTPD server, MySQL, Linux kernel, Apache AXIS framework [12] and space mission system software [13]. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper focusing on the bug classification according to fault triggers in Android. Our study is performed with 513 bug reports of Cyanogenmod, a widely used Android operating system [14]. For each report, we examine the bug description, comments, as well as attached files carefully. The empirical study is undertaken from the following three aspects: (1) Analyze the bug types in Android. In this part, a systematic capture of bug distribution is obtained. The observations are useful to guide developers in Android focusing on the specific subtypes during bug mitigation.