Behavioral Specification of Android Apps

The importance of software running on mobile platforms has been increasing rapidly. Given the critical tasks that many of these “apps” are designed for, the importance of developing methods for precisely specifying their expected behaviors and testing against these specifications, is clear. In this paper, we report on our on-going work to address these problems for applications on the Android platform. We propose an approach to specifying the behavior of Android apps in which such information as the detailed layout on the display are abstracted away but the behavior that results when the app user presses specific buttons on the display or provides other input, are specified. The approach also allows us to specify the behavior that results when the system invokes various lifecycle methods. We also briefly consider how suitable test cases may be generated, based on these specifications, so that the app may be tested to identify potential problems.