  Smart TVs are coming to dominate the television market. This accompanied by
an increase in the use of smart TV applications (apps). Due to the increasing
demand, developers need modeling techniques to analyze these apps and assess
their comprehensiveness, completeness, and quality. In this paper, we present
an automated strategy for generating models of smart TV apps based on black-box
reverse engineering. The strategy can be used to cumulatively construct a model
for a given app by exploring the user interface in a manner consistent with the
use of a remote control device and extracting the runtime information. The
strategy is based on capturing the states of the user interface to create a
model during runtime without any knowledge of the internal structure of the
app. We have implemented our strategy in a tool called EvoCreeper. The
evaluation results show that our strategy can automatically generate unique
states and a comprehensive model that represents the real user interactions
with an app using a remote control device. The models thus generated can be
used to assess the quality and completeness of smart TV apps in various
contexts, such as the control of other consumer electronics in smart houses.
