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

Mobile apps are ubiquitous in our daily lives for supporting different taskssuch as reading and chatting. Despite the availability of many GUI testingtools, app testers still struggle with low testing code coverage due to toolsfrequently getting stuck in loops or overlooking activities with concealedentries. This results in a significant amount of testing time being spent onredundant and repetitive exploration of a few GUI pages. To address this, weutilize Android's deep links, which assist in triggering Android intents tolead users to specific pages and introduce a deep link-enhanced explorationmethod. This approach, integrated into the testing tool Monkey, gives rise toDelm (Deep Link-enhanced Monkey). Delm oversees the dynamic explorationprocess, guiding the tool out of meaningless testing loops to unexplored GUIpages. We provide a rigorous activity context mock-up approach for triggeringexisting Android intents to discover more activities with hidden entrances. Weconduct experiments to evaluate Delm's effectiveness on activity contextmock-up, activity coverage, method coverage, and crash detection. The findingsreveal that Delm can mock up more complex activity contexts and significantlyoutperform state-of-the-art baselines with 27.2% activity coverage, 21.13%method coverage, and 23.81% crash detection.