SPECIFICATION, VALIDATION AND VERIFICATION OF MOBILE APPLICATION BEHAVIOR

Abstract

Mobile devices have, in many ways, replaced traditional desktops in usability, usefulness, and availability. Improvements to computational power, battery life, device capabilities, and user experience will continue to drive people to stop using desktops and solely use mobile devices. Applications are vital to maximize usefulness of these devices. Development of these applications proceeds with a rapidity that surpasses the development pace of the devices themselves. Current methods are inadequate when attempting to verify and validate the behavior of the applications to ensure they perform correctly as the customer expect and correctly with respect to the software specifications. The current V&V methods are limited to environments that do not reflect the typical operational environment for mobile devices. These methods lead to false beliefs that the results of V&V tests prove correctness of the software, when they are only proving that the software works in a non-mobile environment. To solve this problem, we propose that application log files be used to capture the execution behavior while operating in their typical environment. The log file along with customer requirements, represented formally as statechart assertions, will provide a mechanism to conduct automated V&V on the behavior of the application while it was operating in its planned, mobile environment.