Assessing and Improving the Software Quality of Mobile Applications

在过去的十年中，移动应用程序(又名：移动应用程序)对终端用户可用。移动应用程序不仅侵入了我们日常生活的各个领域，不仅包括游戏、娱乐和社交网络，还包括商业、教育、金融和健康。不断增长的用户需求和移动应用的流行促使移动开发人员在压力下快速实施、维护和发展应用。因此，软件工程师可能并不总是遵循良好的设计和实现实践。模式，并可能采用被反对派称为反模式的坏做法。反模式的存在可能会导致软件质量较差，从而阻碍应用程序的发展，并降低最终用户体验的质量。 我打算在面向移动的发展背景下，为“保护和改进软件质量”这一重要挑战做出贡献。这项研究计划的长期目标是构建一个推荐系统，用于评估和提高移动应用的软件质量。这项工作将为移动工程师提供技术和工具，以支持他们的演进任务，并为最终用户提供更好的体验。我们将通过提出和应用一种检测和纠正移动反模式的方法来实现这一目标，并评估它们对依赖各种移动平台的移动应用程序的影响。 这一计划新颖而原创，因为我们针对的是非常重要的软件系统-移动应用程序，这些应用程序正在沿着其底层框架不断演变，并且比其他传统软件系统更新更频繁。此外，我们不仅关注检测，还关注反模式的纠正，这是一个难以解决的问题。除了更正之外，本研究计划还面临的其他挑战是处理移动应用程序的动态特性及其限制(例如CPU、内存、电池等)。以及他们的各种移动平台(iOS、Android、Windows Phone、BlackBerry等)。 多亏了这个推荐系统，我们可以很容易地想象移动工程师会渴望在仪表盘中检查他们的应用程序的软件质量是如何发展的，同时他们也面临着积极更新应用程序以满足用户需求的压力。此外，这项工作将加深我们对移动反模式及其对软件质量的影响的理解。事实上，鉴于软件演进在移动开发中的关键作用和用户体验的重要性，我们预计我们的研究成果将通过提供创新机会，成为加拿大移动行业的竞争优势来源。 这项研究计划将培养11名高素质的人才，即2名博士、4名硕士和5名理科学生，他们将发展软件质量改进方面的专业知识，并在大型和复杂系统的移动开发和演进方面获得丰富的实践经验。

The last decade has witnessed a huge increase in the number of mobile applications (a.k.a. mobile apps) available to end users. Mobile apps invaded all areas of our daily lives not only games, entertainment, and social networking but also business, education, finance, and health. The ever-increasing user requirements and popularity of mobile apps have led mobile developers to implement, maintain, and evolve apps rapidly and under pressure. Hence, software engineers may not always follow good design and implementation practices, a.k.a. patterns, and may adopt bad practices, called by opposition antipatterns. The presence of antipatterns may lead to poor software quality, thus hindering the evolution of apps and degrading the quality of the end-user experience. I intend to contribute to the important challenge of "Preserving and improving software quality" in the context of mobile-oriented evolution. The long-term objective of this research program is to build a recommender system for assessing and improving the software quality of mobile apps. This work will provide mobile engineers with techniques and tools to support their evolution tasks and to deliver a better experience to end-users. We will achieve this objective by proposing and applying a methodology to detect and correct mobile antipatterns, and evaluate their impact in mobile apps relying on various mobile platforms. This program is novel and original as we target software systems of prominent importance, mobile apps, which are constantly evolving along their underlying frameworks, and are updated much more frequently than other traditional software systems. Moreover, we do not focus only on the detection but also on the correction of antipatterns, a difficult problem to tackle. Besides the correction, the other challenges to face in this research program are handling the dynamic nature of mobile apps, their constraints (e.g. CPU, memory, battery, etc.) and their various mobile platforms (iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, etc.). Thanks to this recommender system, we can easily envision that mobile engineers would be eager to inspect in a dashboard how the software quality of their apps evolves, while they are under the pressure of aggressively updating the apps to meet user demands. Moreover, this work will deepen our understanding of mobile antipatterns and of their impact on software quality. Indeed, given the crucial role of software evolution in mobile development and the importance of user experience, we expect that our research result will be a source of competitive advantage for the Canadian mobile industry by providing opportunities for innovation. This research program will train 11 Highly Qualified Personnel, i.e., 2 PhD, 4 MSc and 5 BSc students, who will develop an expertise in software quality improvement, and gain extensive hands-on experience with mobile development and evolution on large and complex systems.