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Github repo link

https://github.com/ecnusse/Kea2

点击此处：查看中文文档

About

Kea2's logo: A large parrot skilled in finding "bugs"

Kea2 is an easy-to-use tool for fuzzing mobile apps. Its key novelty is able to fuse automated UI testing with scripts (usually written by human), thus empowering automated UI testing with human intelligence for effectively finding crashing bugs as well as non-crashing functional (logic) bugs.

Kea2 is currently built on top of Fastbot, an industrial-strength automated UI testing tool, and uiautomator2, an easy-to-use and stable Android automation library. Kea2 currently targets Android apps.

Novelty & Important features

• Feature 1(查找稳定性问题): coming with the full capability of Fastbot for stress testing and finding stability problems (i.e., crashing bugs);

• Feature 2(自定义测试场景\事件序列\黑白名单\黑白控件¹): customizing testing scenarios when running Fastbot (e.g., testing specific app functionalities, executing specific event traces, entering specifc UI pages, reaching specific app states, blacklisting specific activities/UI widgets/UI regions) with the full capability and flexibility powered by python language and uiautomator2;

• Feature 3(支持断言机制²): supporting auto-assertions when running Fastbot, based on the idea of property-based testing inheritted from Kea, for finding logic bugs (i.e., non-crashing functional bugs).

  For Feature 2 and 3, Kea2 allows you to focus on what app functionalities to be tested. You do not need to worry about how to reach these app functionalities. Just let Fastbot help. As a result, your scripts are usually short, robust and easy to maintain, and the corresponding app functionalities are much more stress-tested!

The ability of the three features in Kea2

	Feature 1	Feature 2	Feature 3
Finding crashes	👍	👍	👍
Finding crashes in deep states		👍	👍
Finding non-crashing functional (logic) bugs			👍

Kea2's Users

Kea2 (and its idea) has been used/integrated by

• OPay Business --- a financial & payment app. OPay uses Kea2 for regression testing on POS machines and mobile devices.

• WeChat's iExplorer --- WeChat's in-house testing platform

• ByteDance's Fastbot

Please let us know and willing to hear your feedback/questions if you are also using Kea2.

Design & Roadmap

Kea2 currently works with:

• unittest as the testing framework to manage the scripts;
• uiautomator2 as the UI test driver;
• Fastbot as the backend automated UI testing tool.

In the future, Kea2 will be extended to support

• pytest, another popular python testing framework;
• Appium, Hypium (for HarmonyOS/Open Harmony);
• any other automated UI testing tools (not limited to Fastbot)

Installation

Running environment:

• support Windows, MacOS and Linux
• python 3.8+, Android 5.0~16.0 (Android SDK installed)
• VPN closed (Features 2 and 3 required)

Install Kea2 by pip:

python3 -m pip install kea2-python

Find Kea2's options by running

kea2 -h

Upgrade Kea2 to its latest version if you already installed Kea2 before:

python3 -m pip install -U kea2-python

Quick Test

Kea2 connects to and runs on Android devices. We recommend you to do a quick test to ensure that Kea2 is compatible with your devices.

1. Connect to a real Android device or an Android emulator (only one device is enough) and make sure you can see the connected device by running adb devices.

2. Run quicktest.py to test a sample app omninotes (released as omninotes.apk in Kea2's repository). The script quicktest.py will automatically install and test this sample app for a short time.

Initialize Kea2 under your preferred working directory:

kea2 init

This step is always needed if it is your first time to run Kea2.

Run the quick test:

python3 quicktest.py

If you can see the app omninotes is successfully running and tested, Kea2 works! Otherwise, please help file a bug report with the error message to us. Thank you!

Feature 1(运行基础版Fastbot：查找稳定性错误)

Test your app with the full capability of Fastbot for stress testing and finding stability problems (i.e., crashing bugs);

kea2 run -s "emulator-5554" -p it.feio.android.omninotes.alpha --agent native --running-minutes 10 --throttle 200

To understand the meanings of the options, you can see our manual.

The usage is similar to the the original Fastbot's shell commands.

See more options by

kea2 run -h

Feature 2(运行增强版Fastbot：自定义测试场景\事件序列\黑白控件)

When running any automated UI testing tools like Fastbot to test your apps, you may find that some specifc UI pages or functionalities are difficult to reach or cover. The reason is that Fastbot lacks knowledge of your apps. Fortunately, this is the strength of script testing. In Feature 2, Kea2 can support writing small scripts to guide Fastbot to explore wherever we want. You can also use such small scripts to block specific widgets during UI testing.

In Kea2, a script is composed of two elements:

• Precondition: When to execute the script.
• Interaction scenario: The interaction logic (specified in the script's test method) to reach where we want.

Simple Example

Assuming Privacy is a hard-to-reach UI page during automated UI testing. Kea2 can easily guide Fastbot to reach this page.

    @prob(0.5)
    # precondition: when we are at the page `Home`
    @precondition(lambda self: 
        self.d(text="Home").exists
    )
    def test_goToPrivacy(self):
        """
        Guide Fastbot to the page `Privacy` by opening `Drawer`, 
        clicking the option `Setting` and clicking `Privacy`.
        """
        self.d(description="Drawer").click()
        self.d(text="Settings").click()
        self.d(text="Privacy").click()

• By the decorator @precondition, we specify the precondition --- when we are at the Home page. In this case, the Home page is the entry page of the Privacy page and the Home page can be easily reached by Fastbot. Thus, the script will be activated when we are at Home page by checking whether a unique widget Home exists.
• In script's test method test_goToPrivacy, we specify the interaction logic (i.e., opening Drawer, clicking the option Setting and clicking Privacy) to guide Fastbot to reach the Privacy page.
• By the decorator @prob, we specify the probability (50% in this example) to do the guidance when we are at the Home page. As a result, Kea2 still allows Fastbot to explore other pages.

You can find the full example in script quicktest.py, and run this script with Fastbot by the command kea2 run:

# Launch Kea2 and load one single script quicktest.py.
kea2 run -s "emulator-5554" -p it.feio.android.omninotes.alpha --agent u2 --running-minutes 10 --throttle 200 --driver-name d unittest discover -p quicktest.py

Feature 3(运行增强版Fastbot：加入自动断言)

Kea2 supports auto-assertions when running Fastbot for finding logic bugs (i.e., non-crashing bugs). To achieve this, you can add assertions in the scripts. When an assertion fails during automated UI testing, we find a likely functional bug.

In Feature 3, a script is composed of three elements:

• Precondition: When to execute the script.
• Interaction scenario: The interaction logic (specified in the script's test method).
• Assertion: The expected app behaviour.

Example

In a social media app, message sending is a common feature. On the message sending page, the send button should always appears when the input box is not empty (i.e., has some message).

The expected behavior (the upper figure) and the buggy behavior (the lower figure).

For the preceding always-holding property, we can write the following script to validate the functional correctness: when there is an input_box widget on the message sending page, we can type any non-empty string text into the input box and assert send_button should always exists.

    @precondition(
        lambda self: self.d(description="input_box").exists
    )
    def test_input_box(self):
        from hypothesis.strategies import text, ascii_letters
        random_str = text(alphabet=ascii_letters).example()
        self.d(description="input_box").set_text(random_str)
        assert self.d(description="send_button").exist

        # we can even do more assertions, e.g.,
        #       the input string should exist on the message sending page
        assert self.d(text=random_str).exist

We use hypothesis to generate random texts.

You can run this example by using the similar command line in Feature 2.

Test Reports（测试报告）

Kea2 automatically generates comprehensive HTML test reports after each testing session.

The reports support both single test runs and merged analysis of multiple test sessions, making it easy to track testing progress and identify issues.

• View detailed test report documentation

Documentations（更多文档）

You can find the user manual, which includes:

• Examples of using Kea2 on WeChat (in Chinese);
• How to define Kea2's scripts and use the decorators (e.g., @precondition、@prob、@max_tries);
• How to run Kea2 and Kea2's command line options
• How to find and understand Kea2's testing results
• How to whitelist or blacklist specific activities, UI widgets and UI regions during fuzzing
• Q&A for Kea2 and PBT (对Kea2和PBT技术的常见问题和回答)

Some blogs on Kea/Kea2 (in Chinese):

• 别再苦哈哈写测试脚本了，生成它们吧！(一)
• 别再苦哈哈写测试脚本了，生成它们吧！(二)
• 别再苦哈哈写测试脚本了，生成它们吧！(三)
• 2025 Let’s GoSSIP 软件安全暑期学校预告第一弹——Kea2
• 功能性质驱动的测试技术：下一代GUI自动化测试技术 --- 视频回放&PPT@MTSC 2025

工业界对Kea2的理解和评价（点击箭头查看详情）：

Kea2的性质是什么含义？Kea2意义和价值是什么？

kea2 其实是一个工具，它是python+u2+fastbot的集合体。 它本身更像是一台装好了发动机和轮子的汽车底盘。

性质是苏老师他们团队提出的一个概念， 转换到测试领域的实际工作中，性质对应的是最小单位的功能（原子级功能），性质的依赖条件很少或没有，它可以自身运行。一个典型的性质就是登录，它仅仅具有输入用户名，输入密码，提交。再举个例子，给视频点个赞，也就是简单的两三步。就是一个性质。

性质与kea2结合的意义是在于解决过去使用appium过重的问题。用appium去测试一个性质通常要写很多行的代码，引导界面到达性质的位置。但使用kea2，就只需要编写性质，如何到其所在的位置是交给fastbot和它的学习算法来搞定的。 

kea2另个重大的价值是，它解决了上述思想所需要的技术支撑，比appium更轻量的UI编写方式，fastbot编写性质的能力不足，以及无法编写逻辑和断言。整体上是保留了fastbot以往的优秀品质，完善了其不足和短板。

简而言之，需要做传统的编排型的功能测试，仍然使用appium，使用kea2也行，但你感觉不到它的价值。本身有需要做混沌测试，模糊测试，兼容性测试。那么强烈，强烈推荐kea2。kea2更偏探索性测试而非编排型。

kea2组成是什么？kea2的核心作用？kea2做了什么？

kea2 组成：

fastbot  --  fuzz测试引擎，负责跑路。
u2 -- 负责进行业务空间的操作。与使用selenium，appium，没什么区别。
python --  u2的操作，逻辑的编写，定制化的实现。

kea2的核心作用：

提供了条件触发器。 在FB跑路的时候，会不停遍历条件触发器，一旦触发，挂起FB，开始执行触发器指定的 ui test 及 assert。执行完毕，继续切回FB跑路。

hea2做了什么：

替换了FB的条件触发功能。
替换了FB的黑名单，黑控件功能。
替换了FB剪枝功能。
增加了多元化的元素空间操作能力。
增加了fuzz测试中的 逻辑设定。
增加了断言能力。
增加了元素操作能力。

Open-source projects used by Kea2

• Fastbot
• uiautomator2
• hypothesis

Relevant papers of Kea2

General and Practical Property-based Testing for Android Apps. ASE 2024. pdf

An Empirical Study of Functional Bugs in Android Apps. ISSTA 2023. pdf

Fastbot2: Reusable Automated Model-based GUI Testing for Android Enhanced by Reinforcement Learning. ASE 2022. pdf

Guided, Stochastic Model-Based GUI Testing of Android Apps. ESEC/FSE 2017. pdf

Maintainers/Contributors

Kea2 has been actively developed and maintained by the people in ecnusse:

• Xixian Liang (@XixianLiang)
• Bo Ma (@majuzi123)
• Cheng Peng (@Drifterpc)
• Ting Su (@tingsu)

Zhendong Su, Yiheng Xiong, Xiangchen Shen, Mengqian Xu, Haiying Sun, Jingling Sun, Jue Wang have also been actively participated in this project and contributed a lot!

Kea2 has also received many valuable insights, advices, feedbacks and lessons shared by several industrial people from Bytedance (Zhao Zhang, Yuhui Su from the Fastbot team), OPay (Tiesong Liu), WeChat (Haochuan Lu, Yuetang Deng), Huawei, Xiaomi and etc. Kudos!

Footnotes

1. 不少UI自动化测试工具提供了“自定义事件序列”能力（如Fastbot 和AppCrawler），但在实际使用中存在不少问题，如自定义能力有限、使用不灵活等。此前不少Fastbot用户抱怨过其“自定义事件序列”在使用中的问题，如#209, #225, #286等。 ↩

2. 在UI自动化测试过程中支持自动断言是一个很重要的能力，但几乎没有测试工具提供这样的能力。我们注意到AppCrawler的开发者曾经希望提供一种断言机制，得到了用户的热切响应，不少用户从21年就开始催更，但始终未能实现。 ↩