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: 2022
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2022-01-01 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=754249
• 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.

移动的软件系统在软件领域中已经迅速变得非常流行。今天，移动的应用程序构成了当前软件市场的最大部分之一，影响着数十亿人的日常生活。移动的应用商店为开发、商业化和使用与传统软件开发不同的软件应用引入了新的方法和环境。移动的应用程序开发通常等同于快速的开发周期、较小的库、移动的设备的有限资源，并且与ad-hoc开发技术相结合，可能导致系统的质量和可用性较低。此外，移动的应用程序总是有很短的发布期限，迫使开发人员更多地关注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一些特定的不良设计和编码实践，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，用户反馈在移动的应用程序的开发和维护中起着核心作用，并反映了应用程序的成功。在构建成功的软件产品时，用户对移动的应用程序的反馈和体验始终是一个关键问题，可以帮助开发人员了解开发和维护工作的方向。该研究计划将探索并采用几种广泛认可的数据分析，基于搜索的优化，程序分析和情感分析技术，以解决移动的应用程序的维护和进化问题。首先，我们采用实证方法，通过对当前移动的应用市场（包括Google Play Store和App Store）的大规模实证研究，分析、理解和揭示有关移动的应用质量方面、代码气味、重构以及用户情绪和意见的见解。然后，我们将利用这些丰富的知识做出合理的数据驱动决策，并构建可操作的、准确的和强大的方法和工具，移动的应用程序开发人员可以使用这些方法和工具来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。从这个研究项目中产生的方法和工具将在现实世界的开源和工业移动的应用程序中进行评估，涉及专业开发人员，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，促进移动的应用程序的开发和使用在我们的社会。我们将积极寻求通过针对五名研究生和五名本科生的合作和实习将我们的成果转移到加拿大软件行业，他们将参与并担任我们研究计划的联络人。