Developing a Framework for Testing Android Applications based on Reverse Engineering Techniques
Noor Jamal Alkhateeb, Mohammad Saeed Abou Trab · Journal of Digital Information Management · 2019
It has been recognized that mobile platforms continue to prevail in all aspects of human activity.However, mobile applications might suffer from improper behavior just like other software types.Consequently, there is a growing need for testing mobile applications thoroughly.Model-based testing is one of the popular testing approaches, which depends on having a functional model of system specification to generate and evaluate test cases.In most cases, the specification model is not available, suffers from an unsatisfactory quality, or does not represent all business rules and functional requirements.That would lead to increase in the difficulties in testing, modifying and maintaining mobile applications.Reverse engineering can be used to reveal application's designs, architecture and knowledge and extract models to represent them.This paper proposes a solution by developing a framework for testing mobile applications and automatically extracting a GUI (Graphical User Interface) model based on reverse engineering techniques.The extracted model is then extended by adding missing functional requirements and business rules and validated according to accuracy and quality measures.The framework is evaluated by testing two android applications and comparing the testing outcomes with similar frameworks.The evaluation shows promising results in terms of coverage ratio and fault detection.