A Hybrid Approach for Reverse Engineering GUI Model from Android Apps for Automated Testing

Abstract

Nowadays, smartphone users are increasingly relying on mobile applications to complete most of their daily tasks. As such, mobile applications are becoming more and more complex. Therefore, software testers can no longer rely on manual testing methods to test mobile applications. Automated model-based testing techniques are recently used to test mobile applications. However, the models generated by existing techniques are of insufficient quality. This paper proposed a hybrid technique for reverse engineering graphical user interface (GUI) model from mobile applications. It performs static analysis of application’s bytecode to extract GUI information followed by a dynamic crawling to systematically explore and reverse engineer a model of the application under test. A case study was performed on real-world mobile apps to evaluate the effectiveness of the technique. The results showed that the proposed technique can generate a model with high coverage of mobile apps behaviour.