[A systematic mapping study for graphical user interface testing

on mobile apps](#) Graphical User Interface (GUI) is a vital part of software apps, especially for mobile apps. It facilitates the interactions between the users and the apps. Apps with higher-quality, well-designed, and tested GUI tend to have higher downloads in the apps store. In recent years, research about GUI testing has become a hot spot. However, few efforts were made to review the researcher community and research status of the literature for GUI testing on mobile apps, which brings an obstacle to characterize and understand this field. To overcome this obstacle, we propose a literature analysis framework to gain insights. First, we conduct an extensive search of relevant literature over seven popular digital libraries. In this process, we carefully select 84 primary studies on GUI testing for mobile apps from 3,420 candidate studies. Next, we analyze the primary studies of the last 10 years from two perspectives. From the perspective of bibliometrics, first, we analyze the popular research topics and their relationships. Second, we study the authors' community. From the perspective of in-depth qualitative analysis, we analyze the objectives, approaches, and evaluation metrics employed in these primary studies. Our investigation reports several major findings: (1) in the field of GUI testing for mobile apps, there are relatively more studies on two topics, i.e., test case generation and automated test. (2) The most productive authors tend to collaborate and often have relatively broad research interests. (3) We found that functionality is the main objective of GUI testing; the model-based approach is the most widely used in the area. Finally, we discuss some open issues about challenges and suggest multiple possible research opportunities.