A Static-dynamic Approach for UI Model Generation for Mobile Applications

Abstract

Nowadays, smartphone users are increasingly relying on mobile applications to complete most of their daily tasks. To ensure acceptable quality and to meet its specifications, mobile apps need to be tested thoroughly. As testing mobile apps becomes challenging and tedious, test automation can alleviate this process. Model-based testing is an approach for test automation that is popularly used to test mobile applications. In order to benefit from model-based testing, there is a need for technique and tool for automated model generation. Therefore, this paper presents a hybrid approach for automated User Interface (UI) model generation for mobile applications. It performs static analysis of application’s bytecode to extract UI information, followed by a dynamic crawling to systematically explore and reverse engineer a model of the application under test. We then evaluate our approach on several open-source mobile applications. The results showed that our approach can generate a high-quality model from mobile applications.