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

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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.