Enhancing GUI Exploration Coverage of Android Apps with Deep Link-Integrated Monkey

TL;DR

This paper introduces Delm, a deep link-enhanced extension of Monkey, which improves Android app GUI exploration by increasing activity and method coverage and detecting more crashes through better activity context mock-up and guided exploration.

Contribution

It presents a novel deep link-based exploration method integrated into Monkey, significantly enhancing GUI testing coverage and crash detection for Android apps.

Findings

Delm achieves 27.2% activity coverage

Delm improves method coverage by 21.13%

Delm detects 23.81% more crashes

Abstract

Mobile apps are ubiquitous in our daily lives for supporting different tasks such as reading and chatting. Despite the availability of many GUI testing tools, app testers still struggle with low testing code coverage due to tools frequently getting stuck in loops or overlooking activities with concealed entries. This results in a significant amount of testing time being spent on redundant and repetitive exploration of a few GUI pages. To address this, we utilize Android's deep links, which assist in triggering Android intents to lead users to specific pages and introduce a deep link-enhanced exploration method. This approach, integrated into the testing tool Monkey, gives rise to Delm (Deep Link-enhanced Monkey). Delm oversees the dynamic exploration process, guiding the tool out of meaningless testing loops to unexplored GUI pages. We provide a rigorous activity context mock-up approach for triggering existing Android intents to discover more activities with hidden entrances. We conduct experiments to evaluate Delm's effectiveness on activity context mock-up, activity coverage, method coverage, and crash detection. The findings reveal that Delm can mock up more complex activity contexts and significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines with 27.2\% activity coverage, 21.13\% method coverage, and 23.81\% crash detection.