Context: Mobile application functional features are implemented through GUI event handlers, whereas user-visible behaviors emerge from meaningful sequences of these handlers. Therefore, ensuring correctness and detecting functional defects, especially non-crashing ones, requires test cases enriched with app-specific oracles to validate both individual handlers and higher-level workflows, called targeted test cases. While numerous GUI testing approaches have significantly advanced automated coverage and defect detection, systematically generating targeted test cases to verify the app-specific behaviors of mobile applications remains a challenge.

Objective: This study aims to address this gap by systematically generating targeted test cases to exercise both individual functional features and their meaningful, high-level user workflows in mobile applications.

Method: We propose a feature-oriented, model-based GUI testing approach, which represents the System Under Test (SUT) by introducing two complementary models: the Event Model (EM), which captures individual functional GUI event handlers and their parent–child dependencies, and the Event Relation Model (ERM), which captures meaningful sequences of handlers as user-level functional scenarios. Test cases generated from these models are enriched with GUI-level invariants that serve as app-specific oracles for runtime validation. We evaluate test effectiveness using coverage criteria and mutation testing.

Results: An empirical evaluation on several open-source mobile applications shows that the generated test cases achieve, on average, 85% statement coverage and a 97% mutation score. Moreover, GUI-level invariants improve fault-detection effectiveness by 19% to 32%.

Conclusion: The results demonstrate that combining feature-oriented behavioral modeling with app-specific test oracles, improve the effectiveness of the proposed approach over state-of-the-art testing approaches.