A screen-oriented representation for mobile applications

Program analysis plays an important role in a variety of software engineering processes, such as automated code refactoring, compiler optimizations, and program slicing. The internal program representation used by the program analysis algorithm affects the power and efficiency of the analysis. In particular, representations that contain data-flow information alongside control flow are known to be especially useful. While there are many popular internal program representations with data-flow information for traditional languages and platforms, few specifically target mobile applications. In this paper, we propose a new data-flow-enabled representation that addresses the screen-oriented nature of a mobile application and explores its potential. We consider a mobile application to be a reactive system whose states are the screens, and whose events are user actions, incoming communication, or anything else that causes transition from one screen to another. The resulting representation is a finite state machine extended with data-flow information. We suggest that this representation can greatly contribute to optimization, refactoring, and understanding of mobile applications.