Collaborative Research: CCRI: Planning-C: An Infrastructure and Dataset for Research in Android Testing & Analysis

考虑到移动的应用程序（app）的重要性，研究人员已经投入了相当大的努力来理解，支持和自动化移动的app开发任务。然而，希望为这一工作领域做出贡献的研究人员面临着与构建和维护能够与移动的平台的快速发展保持同步的工具相关的几个挑战（例如，新的Android更新）以及挖掘应用程序和应用程序相关数据的持续过程。该项目旨在开展规划活动，从而构建一个新的共享社区基础设施，以进行移动的应用程序开发研究。该基础设施称为MODAL，将通过提供支持研究过程关键步骤的各种可配置组件，支持软件工程（SE）、计算机安全和人机交互（HCI）等学科的工作。该项目将（1）对SE、计算机安全和HCI社区进行初步调查，以了解这些社区的移动的应用研究需求，（2）进行访谈，了解研究人员面临的障碍，以及特定的社区基础设施如何减轻这些障碍，（3）举办研讨会，促进用于挖掘数据和构建分析工具的最佳实践的交流，以指导基础设施的开发，（4）与现有研究人员一起成立工作组，探索基础设施的设计，研究人员新的主题，和教育工作者的主题，（5）进行总结性调查，以评估拟议的基础设施的能力，以支持移动的应用程序的研究。该项目提出的改进工具和技术将更好地支持应用程序开发人员，使他们能够编写更高质量的应用程序，可能会影响数十亿应用程序用户。本项目还将探索使用设想的基础设施来教学生如何有效地编写移动的应用程序软件的潜力。最后，作为拟议规划活动的一部分，将揭示与移动的应用程序开发研究相关的障碍和挑战，这将为新型课堂教学法和新工具提供信息，这将使新手研究人员受益。该项目的长期目标是围绕拟议的研究基础设施创建一个可持续的开源社区。该社区将通过制定明确的贡献准则，适当分配研究人员的贡献，并将研究人员的贡献分配给更大的学术界来促进。在规划期间，我们将维护一个网站，其中包含与调查，研讨会，工作组和总结性报告有关的详细信息，概述了研究基础设施的拟议设计。该网站可以在以下链接中找到：www.sagelab.io/modalThis奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Given the importance of mobile applications (apps), researchers have dedicated considerable effort toward understanding, supporting, and automating mobile app development tasks. However, researchers looking to contribute to this area of work face several challenges related to building and maintaining tooling that can keep pace with the rapid evolution of mobile platforms (e.g., new Android updates) and the continuous process of mining apps and app-related data. This project aims to carry out planning activities that will lead to the construction of a new shared community infrastructure for conducting mobile app development research. This infrastructure, called MODAL, will support work across the disciplines of software engineering (SE), computer security, and human-computer interaction (HCI) by offering various configurable components supporting key steps of the research process.This project will (1) conduct a preliminary survey of the SE, computer security, and HCI communities to understand the mobile app research needs of these communities, (2) conduct interviews to understand the barriers researchers face and how a specific community infrastructure can mitigate these barriers, (3) host workshops to facilitate the exchange of best practices used for mining data and building analysis tools to guide the development of the infrastructure, (4) conduct a working group to explore the design of the infrastructure with existing researchers, researchers new to the topic, and educators of the topic, and (5) conduct a summative survey to assess the proposed infrastructure’s ability to support mobile app research. The improved tools and techniques proposed by this project will better support app developers, enabling them to write higher quality applications, potentially impacting billions of app users. This project will also explore the potential for using the envisioned infrastructure to teach students how to effectively write mobile app software. Finally, as part of the proposed planning activities, barriers and challenges related to research on mobile app development will be uncovered that will inform new types of classroom pedagogy and new tools that will benefit novice researchers.The long-term goal of this project is the creation of a sustainable open-source community centered around the proposed research infrastructure. The community will be fostered by the development of clear contribution guidelines, proper attribution of researcher contributions, and the distribution of researcher contributions to the larger academic community. During the planning period, we will maintain a website that contains details related to the survey, workshop, working group, and summative report outlining the proposed design of the research infrastructure. The website can be found at the following link: www.sagelab.io/modalThis award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.