Reverse Engineering Mobile Apps for Model Generation Using a Hybrid Approach

The popularity of mobile devices is ever increasing which led to rapid increase in the development of mobile applications. Model-Based testing can improve the quality of mobile application but the models are not always available or are of inadequate quality. Reverse engineering approaches are used to automatically generate model from the GUI of mobile applications for model-based testing. This paper proposes a hybrid approach for reverse engineering mobile applications which exploit the capabilities of both static and dynamic approaches while trying to maximize the quality of the generated models. The insight of this approach is to use static analysis on app’s source to identify supported events. The generated events can be used to dynamically explore an app at run-time to generate a state model of the app’s GUI. The preliminary results from our approach indicated that the technique can generate high quality models from android apps

A User Readiness Model of Social Media for Learning among Polytechnic Students in Nigeria

The adoption of Internet resources for learning continues to grow in the world today. Despite the abundant benefit of utilizing social media due to the growth of web 2.0, an internet resource for communication and interaction, its use has not been fully embraced as a teaching tool in Nigeria. Social media is becoming a prominent communication tool and found to be facilitating teaching and learning activities among students. However, the user readiness of social media in learning by the students has been challenging. Despite the wide acceptance of social media (such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, e.t.c.) amongst Nigerian polytechnic students, they do not utilize it for academic pursuit. This study examined the Use of Social Media among students in Nigerian Polytechnics. The main objective of this study is to find out the user readiness’ factors that influence the use of social media by the students in Nigerian Polytechnic. The evaluation results show that social media is an indispensable Internet platform among Nigerian Polytechnic students

A hybrid approach for reverse engineering gui model from mobile apps for automated testing

The past few years have experienced a massive transformation in personal computing where mobile devices are rapidly replacing traditional computers for an increasing number of users. This has impacted the area of software development through the growing sector of mobile applications for mobile devices. Like the traditional software applications, mobile apps must also be tested to ensure they behave correctly. Graphical User Interface (GUI) testing has been an effective means of validating GUI software particularly Android mobile applications (mobile apps). However, it still suffers a strong challenge about how to explore event sequence in the GUIs. Researchers and practitioners have proposed several approaches and tools for automated testing of mobile apps. Most of the approaches reverse engineer a model of an application under test and use it for the creation of test cases. However, the models generated by existing approaches are not comprehensive due to inability to explore application’s behaviour extensively. This study proposes a technique based on hybrid approach for the systematic exploration of mobile apps’ events which exploit the capabilities of both static and dynamic approaches while trying to improve application’s state exploration and the generation of a high-quality model from a mobile app. A static analysis was performed on application’s bytecode to extract events supported by an app and use the extracted events to dynamically explore an app at run-time. The hybrid approach was implemented in our tool called AMOGA (Automated Model Generator for Android). AMOGA is developed in Java programming language and was validated using real world mobile apps. Results of the experimental evaluation show that AMOGA has 45%-93% coverage across the 13 apps. In comparison to other existing tools, the result shows that AMOGA achieves better coverage than all the tools with a difference of above 4% on all the apps

Design and Implementation of a Mobile Library Management System for Improving Service Delivery

A mobile library management system provides a more efficient way of managing library processes and rendering effective library services irrespective of time and place. This research work aimed to develop a Mobile Library Management System for the Nile University of Nigeria Library to overcome the challenges that hinder the librarians from managing the library processes on the go. The android mobile library management system was developed using Android Studio, HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQLi database. Service Responsibility Table was used in eliciting and documenting the user’s requirements for the library management system. The proposed Android-based mobile library system was evaluated through a survey by the librarians. The evaluation has shown that the proposed system is capable of complementing the existing library management systems

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

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

Automatic Classification of Equivalent Mutants in Mutation Testing of Android Applications

Software and symmetric testing methodologies are primarily used in detecting software defects, but these testing methodologies need to be optimized to mitigate the wasting of resources. As mobile applications are becoming more prevalent in recent times, the need to have mobile applications that satisfy software quality through testing cannot be overemphasized. Testing suites and software quality assurance techniques have also become prevalent, which underscores the need to evaluate the efficacy of these tools in the testing of the applications. Mutation testing is one such technique, which is the process of injecting small changes into the software under test (SUT), thereby creating mutants. These mutants are then tested using mutation testing techniques alongside the SUT to determine the effectiveness of test suites through mutation scoring. Although mutation testing is effective, the cost of implementing it, due to the problem of equivalent mutants, is very high. Many research works gave varying solutions to this problem, but none used a standardized dataset. In this research work, we employed a standard mutant dataset tool called MutantBench to generate our data. Subsequently, an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) was used in conjunction with a tree-based convolutional neural network (TBCNN) as our deep learning model to automate the classification of the equivalent mutants to reduce the cost of mutation testing in software testing of android applications. The result shows that the proposed model produces a good accuracy rate of 94%, as well as other performance metrics such as recall (96%), precision (89%), F1-score (92%), and Matthew’s correlation coefficients (88%) with fewer False Negatives and False Positives during testing, which is significant as it implies that there is a decrease in the risk of misclassification.publishedVersio

Improving the documentation of user’s requirements for e-service systems using service responsibility tables

Popularity of the internet has caused an increase in the demand and usage of e-service systems. E-Service is defined as acts or performances that are delivered through electronic devices and networks to help people complete tasks, solve problems, or conduct transactions. The nature of e-service poses challenges in analyzing and developing the e-service systems. In recent years, UML as a tool used for analyzing systems has been criticized by several researchers and practitioners for its complexity and lack of comprehension. This has caused difficulties in using UML to analyse e-service system. As a result of this, Service Responsibility Tables (SRT) has been proposed to be used for analyzing e-service systems. Service responsibility tables is a light weight analysis tool was developed based on the concept of service value chain framework, which focuses on the activities and responsibilities of both service providers and customers based on the broad observation that service tends to be co-produced by service producers and service consumers. This research investigates the usability of SRTs as an informal language and light weight analysis tool for analyzing e-service systems, using Graduate Studies Management System (GSMS) as a case study and presents the evaluation of the tool by the users. Furthermore, the research proposed a heuristics approach for transforming the SRTs into activity diagrams and sequence diagram. From the evaluations, we found that the proposed heuristic approach could increase the involvement of users in requirements determination process and hence improve the documentation of users’ requirements for e-service systems

A hybrid approach for reverse engineering GUI model from android apps for automated testing

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 behaviou

A User Readiness Model of Social Media for Learning among Polytechnic Students in Nigeria

The adoption of Internet resources for learning continues to grow in the world today. Despite the abundant benefit of utilizing social media due to the growth of web 2.0, an internet resource for communication and interaction, its use has not been fully embraced as a teaching tool in Nigeria. Social media is becoming a prominent communication tool and found to be facilitating teaching and learning activities among students. However, the user readiness of social media in learning by the students has been challenging. Despite the wide acceptance of social media (such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, e.t.c.) amongst Nigerian polytechnic students, they do not utilize it for academic pursuit. This study examined the Use of Social Media among students in Nigerian Polytechnics. The main objective of this study is to find out the user readiness’ factors that influence the use of social media by the students in Nigerian Polytechnic. The evaluation results show that social media is an indispensable Internet platform among Nigerian Polytechnic students

AMOGA: A Static-Dynamic Model Generation Strategy for Mobile Apps Testing

In the past few years, mobile devices have been increasingly replacing traditional computers, as their capabilities, such as CPU computation, memory, RAM size, and many more, are being enhanced almost to the level of conventional computers. These capabilities are being exploited by mobile apps developers to produce apps that offer more functionalities and optimized performance. To ensure acceptable quality and to meet their specifications (e.g., design), mobile apps need to be tested thoroughly. As the testing process is often tedious, test automation can be the key to alleviating such laborious activities. In the context of the Android-based mobile apps, researchers and practitioners have proposed many approaches to automate the testing process mainly on the creation of the test suite. Although useful, most existing approaches rely on reverse engineering a model of the application under test for test case creation. Often, such approaches exhibit a lack of comprehensiveness, as the application model does not capture the dynamic behavior of the applications extensively due to the incompleteness of reverse engineering approaches. To address this issue, this paper proposes AMOGA, a strategy that uses a hybrid, static-dynamic approach for generating a user interface model from mobile apps for model-based testing. AMOGA implements a novel crawling technique that uses the event list of UI element associated with each event to dynamically exercise the events ordering at the run time to explore the applications’ behavior. An experimental evaluation was performed to assess the effectiveness of our strategy by measuring the code coverage and the fault detection capability through the use of mutation testing concept. The results of the experimental assessment showed that AMOGA represents an alternative approach for model-based testing of mobile apps by generating comprehensive models to improve the coverage of the applications. The strategy proved its effectiveness by achievin..