Leveraging software quality and user opinion to support maintenance and evolution of mobile software systems

利用软件质量和用户意见来支持移动软件系统的维护和发展

• 批准号: RGPIN-2018-05960
• 负责人: Ouni, Ali
• 金额: $ 2.4万
• 依托单位: École de technologie supérieure
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2020-01-01 至 2021-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=713965
• 关键词: Leveraging; software; quality; user; opinion

Mobile software systems have quickly become immensely popular in the software universe. Today, mobile apps constitute one of the largest parts of the current software market influencing the everyday life of billions of people. mobile app stores introduced new approaches and an environment to develop, commercialize and use software applications that differ from those of traditional software development. Mobile apps development is often equated with rapid development cycles, smaller size libraries, limited resources for mobile devices, and coupled with ad-hoc development techniques, potentially resulting into systems of lower quality and usability. Furthermore, mobile apps always have short release deadlines forcing the developers to focus more on implementing the required features and fixing important bugs rather than meeting diverse quality standards. Consequently, several specific bad design and coding practices, commonly called code smells, could be introduced by developers which may impede the apps maintenance and evolution, while being frustrating to users. Indeed, user feedback plays a central role in the development and maintenance of mobile apps and reflects the success of the app. The user feedback and experience with the mobile app is always a key concern, when building a successful software product, that help developers understanding where to direct the development and maintenance efforts. This research program will explore and adopt several widely-acknowledged data analytics, search-based optimization, program analysis, and sentiment analysis techniques to address maintenance and evolution problems of mobile apps. First, following an empirical approach, we start by analyzing, understanding and uncovering insights about mobile apps quality aspects, code smells, refactoring, and user's sentiments and opinions through large-scale empirical studies on the current mobile app market including Google Play Store and App Store. Then, we will use this rich knowledge to make sound data driven decisions and build actionable, accurate and robust approaches and tools that mobile app developers can use to maintain and evolve their apps more effectively while making the app's quality, performance and user satisfaction as top priorities. The resulting approaches and tools from this research program will be evaluated on real-world open-source and industrial mobile apps involving professional developers to assess its usefulness in practice. The research program aims at improving our software industry and foster mobile apps development and use in our society. We will actively seek to transfer our results to the Canadian software industry by means of collaborations and internships targeted to five graduate, and five undergraduate students who would participate and serve as liaisons with our research program.

移动软件系统在软件界迅速变得非常流行。今天，移动应用程序构成了当前软件市场中影响数十亿人日常生活的最大部分之一。移动应用商店引入了新的方法和环境来开发、商业化和使用不同于传统软件开发的软件应用。移动应用程序的开发通常等同于快速的开发周期、较小的库、有限的移动设备资源，再加上临时开发技术，可能会导致系统的质量和可用性较低。此外，移动应用程序的发布期限总是很短，这迫使开发人员更多地专注于实现所需的功能和修复重要的错误，而不是满足不同的质量标准。因此，开发人员可能会引入几种特定的糟糕的设计和编码实践，通常称为代码气味，这可能会阻碍应用程序的维护和发展，同时会让用户感到沮丧。事实上，用户反馈在移动应用程序的开发和维护中发挥着核心作用，并反映了应用程序的成功。在构建一个成功的软件产品时，用户对移动应用程序的反馈和体验始终是一个关键问题，这有助于开发人员了解将开发和维护工作引导到哪里。 该研究项目将探索和采用几种公认的数据分析、基于搜索的优化、程序分析和情绪分析技术，以解决移动应用程序的维护和演进问题。首先，遵循实证方法，我们首先通过对当前移动应用市场(包括Google Play Store和App Store)的大规模实证研究，分析、理解和揭示关于移动应用质量方面、代码气味、重构以及用户情绪和意见的见解。然后，我们将使用这些丰富的知识来做出合理的数据驱动决策，并构建可操作、准确和强大的方法和工具，移动应用程序开发人员可以使用这些方法和工具更有效地维护和发展他们的应用程序，同时将应用程序的质量、性能和用户满意度作为首要任务。这一研究项目产生的方法和工具将在由专业开发人员参与的真实世界开源和工业移动应用程序上进行评估，以评估其在实践中的有用性。该研究计划旨在改善我们的软件行业，并在我们的社会中促进移动应用程序的开发和使用。我们将积极寻求通过合作和实习的方式将我们的成果转移到加拿大软件行业，目标是五名研究生和五名本科生，他们将参与我们的研究计划并担任联络人。