I-Corps: Capturing Field Data for Mobile Applications

移动应用程序非常普遍，并且越来越多地被用于商业活动。由于移动用户环境并不直接处于开发此类应用程序的公司的控制之下，因此他们很难观察、再现、调查和修复现场发生的故障。此外，移动环境可能是异构的，并且可能导致应用程序行为中出现不同类型的问题，这使得调查这些问题以及与之相关的可能的故障变得更加困难。在解决这些故障方面的延迟会导致客户支持方面的高成本，并且由于不满意的客户的差评而导致应用程序商店中的声誉损失。这个I-Corps团队提出了一种新颖的方法，可以捕获移动应用程序在该领域的运行时行为，并使其可供开发人员使用。该项目的目标是完成客户验证，以开发一种概念验证技术和工具，用于捕获与移动应用程序相关的现场数据。该技术将收集这些字段数据，这些数据由特定移动环境下应用程序的不同运行时状态和导致这些状态的操作序列组成。这些信息将以可视格式报告，以允许开发人员识别从不同环境中获得的运行时行为之间的共性和差异。尽管该技术的具体细节可能会根据与潜在客户的交互而改变，但它具有支持移动应用程序的测试和维护活动的基本成分。

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.