I. INTRODUCTION
Applications running on mobile devices (e.g., mobile
applications running on smart phone or new generation
tablets) are becoming so popular that they are representing a
re-volution in the IT sector. In three years, over 300,000 mobile
applications have been developed (mobithinking.com),
they have been downloaded 10.9 billion times in 2010
(www.idc.com) with a forecast of 29 billions applications
downloaded in 2011 (www.abiresearch.com) and a prediction
of 76.9 billion global downloads in 2014 that will be
worth US$35 billion (www.idc.com).
While mobile applications were initially developed mostly
in the entertainment sector, they are now touching more
critical domains: think about the NFC or SQUARE
(https://squareup.com/) technologies intended to revolutionize
the current payment system, to the m-government
(www.mobih.org/resources/) and mobile-health initiatives1
,
or to the huge amount of enterprise and industry-specific
mobile applications expected to be produced in the next
years [2].
The exponential growth of this market and the criticality
of the developed (or, to be developed) systems impose an
increased attention to dependability aspects of applications
running on them. As demonstrated in some studies [7],
[9], mobile applications are not bug free and new software