DragonCrawl: A Generative, Intent-Based Framework for Scalable Mobile End-to-End Testing
Source
Sowjanya Puligadda, Mengdie Zhang, Ali Zamani, Dhruva Dixith Kurra, Eric Chen, Juan Marcano
Author
Sowjanya Puligadda, Mengdie Zhang, Ali Zamani, Dhruva Dixith Kurra, Eric Chen, Juan Marcano
Published
Why it matters
AI-driven mobile testing system replaces brittle E2E test scripts entirely
Uses GPT-4o multimodal reasoning to validate flows on every code change
Cuts test onboarding from 96-120 hours to under 4 hours
Key quotes
“DragonCrawl validates specific user flows on every code change, blocking commits that break critical functionality.”
“The system reduces test onboarding time from 96-120 hours to under 4 hours and has saved an estimated 27 developer years in test maintenance effort.”
Transcript
arXiv:2607.28750v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As mobile applications grow in complexity, traditional End-to-End (E2E) testing frameworks struggle with UI volatility, maintenance overhead, and cross-platform scalability. This paper presents DragonCrawl, an AI-driven mobile testing system for continuous regression testing that has evolved from embedding-based similarity matching to generative intent-based reasoning using large language models. Unlike prior LLM-based testing research focused on exploratory testing and crash detection, DragonCrawl validates specific user flows on every code change, blocking commits that break critical functionality. By leveraging GPT-4o's multimodal capabilities, DragonCrawl achieves 91.6% pass rate on iOS and 92.2% on Android across 1,013 automated tests running continuously in CI/CD pipelines. The system reduces test onboarding time from 96-120 hours to under 4 hours and has saved an estimated 27 developer years in test maintenance effort. We present the architectural evolution from V1 (semantic embedding matching) to V2 (generative intent-based reasoning), discuss implementation challenges including token explosion and memory constraints, and report operational experience from production deployment. The integration of multimodal vision for end-state detection and tool calling for backend state transitions enables comprehensive regression testing that bridges UI interactions with system state. Our results demonstrate that AI-driven testing can maintain stability while eliminating the brittleness of traditional automated tests, enabling continuous quality assurance at scale.