As mobile devices become increasingly smarter and more powerful, so too must the engineering of their software. User-interface-driven system testing of these devices is gaining popularity, with each vendor releasing some automation tool. However, these tools are inappropriate for amateur programmers, an increasing portion of app developers. MobiGUITAR (Mobile GUI Testing Framework) provides automated GUI-driven testing of Android apps. It's based on observation, extraction, and abstraction of GUI widgets' run-time state. The abstraction is a scalable state machine model that, together with test coverage criteria, provides a way to automatically generate test cases. When applied to four open-source Android apps, MobiGUITAR automatically generated and executed 7,711 test cases and reported 10 new bugs. Some bugs were Android-specific, stemming from the event- and activity-driven nature of Android.

As mobile applications become more complex, specific development tools and frameworks as well as cost effective testing techniques and tools will be essential to assure the development of secure, high-quality mobile applications. This paper addresses the problem of automatic testing of mobile applications developed for the Google Android platform, and presents a technique for rapid crash testing and regression testing of Android applications. The technique is based on a crawler that automatically builds a model of the application GUI and obtains test cases that can be automatically executed. The technique is supported by a tool for both crawling the application and generating the test cases. In the paper we present an example of using the technique and the tool for testing a real small size Android application that preliminary shows the effectiveness and usability of the proposed testing approach.