Computer-aided Process and Tools for Mobile Software Acquisition

Abstract

Mobile devices have, in many ways, replaced traditional desktops in usability, usefulness, and availability. Many companies are scrambling to develop enterprise strategies to provide mobile devices and application support for their employees, and the Department of Defense (DoD) is taking the point in the federal government's campaign to deploy mobile devices. A successful DoD mobile software acquisition program requires efficient and effective means to ensure the proper functioning of the applications. As the majority of future mobile apps will be developed by small companies (or crowdsourcing individuals) and have relatively short development cycles, the traditional software verification process that relies on testing of source code is not effective for vetting mobile apps. This paper presents a new approach for vetting mobile software. It allows subject-matter experts to specify desirable and undesirable behaviors of the mobile apps as executable statecharts and verify the target software by running the automatically generated statechart code against the execution trace of the mobile apps using logfile-based runtime verification. A case study of formally specifying, validating, and verifying a set of requirements for an iPhone application that tracks the movement of the iPhone user is used to demonstrate the new approach.