A new method for automated GUI modeling of mobile applications

Abstract

It is often necessary to construct GUI models for automated testing of event-driven GUI applications, so test cases can be generated by traversing the GUI models systematically. It is, however, difficult to apply traditional modeling techniques directly for mobile platforms as common static models cannot reflect application behaviors under different contexts. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach for automated GUI modeling of mobile applications and introduce our unique definition of GUI state equivalence, which can reduce state space and facilitate model merging. The proposed modeling method can already discover subtle implementation issues. Real-world case studies show that the proposed approach is effective for adaptive GUI modeling on the Android platform.