DragonCrawl: A Generative, Intent-Based Framework for Scalable Mobile End-to-End Testing

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.