A systematic mapping study for graphical user interface testing on mobile apps

• Published in: IET software 2023-06, Vol.17 (3), p.249-267
• Main Authors: Nie, Liming, Said, Kabir Sulaiman, Ma, Lingfei, Zheng, Yaowen, Zhao, Yangyang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analysis; Digital libraries; GUI testing; mapping study; mobile application; Mobile applications
• ISSN: 1751-8806; 1751-8814
• DOI: 10.1049/sfw2.12123

Mobile apps with tested Graphical User Interface (GUI) tend to have higher downloads in the apps store. In recent years, few efforts were made to analyse the research community and research status of the literature for GUI testing on mobile apps, which brings an obstacle to characterise and understand this field. In this study, the authors propose a systematic mapping study to gain insights into the field. First, the authors conduct an extensive search of relevant literature over seven popular digital libraries. From 4427 candidate studies, 114 primary studies published between January 2011 and September 2022 were selected. Next, the authors analyse these primary studies from the perspectives of bibliometric and qualitative analysis. For the bibliometric analysis, first, the authors analyse the popular research topics and their relationships. Second, the authors study the authors' community. For the qualitative analysis, the authors analyse the objectives, approaches and evaluation metrics employed in these primary studies. Their investigation reports several major findings: (1) there are relatively more studies on two topics, that is, test case generation and the automated test; (2) the most productive authors tend to collaborate and often have relatively broad research interests; (3) the functionality is the main objective of GUI testing; the model‐based approach is the most widely used. This paper presents a systematic mapping study to gain insight into GUI testing for mobile apps. Through bibliometric analysis, the paper identifies the GUI testing research communities, influential authors, papers and popular topic trends. Additionally, the paper identifies the common approaches and the evaluation metrics used in GUI testing for mobile apps through qualitative analysis.