I-Corps: Capturing Field Data for Mobile Applications

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Mobile applications are prevalent and are increasingly being used for business activities. Because the mobile user environment is not directly under the control of the companies developing such applications, it is difficult for them to observe, reproduce, investigate, and fix failures that occur in the field. Further, mobile environments can be heterogeneous and may lead to different kinds of issues in the application behavior, making it harder to investigate these issues and possible failures associated with them. Delays in addressing these failures lead to high cost in terms of customer support and loss of reputation on the application store due to bad reviews from dis-satisfied customers. This I-Corps team proposes a novel approach that captures the runtime behavior of a mobile application in the field and makes it available to the developer.The goal from this project is to complete the customer validation to develop a proof-of-concept technique and tool for capturing field data relevant to the mobile application. The technique will collect this field data, which consists of different runtime states of the application on specific mobile environments and the sequences of actions leading to such states. This information would be reported in a visual format to allow developers to identify commonalities and differences between the runtime behavior obtained fromdifferent environments. Although the exact details of this technique might change based on interaction with potential customers, it has essential ingredients to support the testing and maintenance activities for the mobile application.