Evaluating usability of cross-platform smartphone applications

The computing power of smartphones is increasing as time goes. However, the proliferation of multiple different types of operating platforms affected interoperable smartphone applications development. Thus, the cross-platform development tools are coined. Literature showed that smartphone applications developed with the native platforms have better user experience than the cross-platform counterparts. However, comparative evaluation of usability of cross-platform applications on the deployment platforms is not studied yet. In this work, we evaluated usability of a crossword puzzle developed with PhoneGap on Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry. The evaluation was conducted focusing on the developer's adaptation effort to native platforms and the end users. Thus, we observed that usability of the cross-platform crossword puzzle is unaffected on the respective native platforms and the SDKs require only minimal configuration effort. In addition, we observed the prospect of HTML5 and related web technologies as our future work towards evaluating and enhancing usability in composing REST-based services for smartphone applications

ONLINE MONITORING USING KISMET

Colleges and universities currently use online exams for student evaluation. Stu- dents can take assigned exams using their laptop computers and email their results to their instructor; this process makes testing more efficient and convenient for both students and faculty. However, taking exams while connected to the Internet opens many opportunities for plagiarism and cheating. In this project, we design, implement, and test a tool that instructors can use to monitor the online activity of students during an in-class online examination. This tool uses a wireless sniffer, Kismet, to capture and classify packets in real time. If a student attempts to access a site that is not allowed, the instructor is notified via an Android application or via Internet. Identifying a student who is cheating is challenging since many applications send packets without user intervention. We provide experimental results from realistic test environments to illustrate the success of our proposed approach

Inverted GUI Development for IoT with Applications in E-Health

In the context of Internet of Things (IoT), the research of this dissertation is concerned with the development of applications for end-user devices, i.e. devices through which the end-user directly interacts with systems. The complexity of such applications is partly due to network intricacies, and partly because GUI (Graphical User Interface) development is generally complicated and time consuming. We employ a middleware framework called PalCom to manage the former, and focus our research on the problems of the latter, by expanding the scope of PalCom to also enable GUI development. In particular, the research goal is a more efficient GUI development approach that does not require program code to be written.To enable end-users with little or no programming experience to participate in the GUI development process, we eliminate the need for programming by introducing a new development approach. We view this approach as “inverted” in that the development focus is on presenting functionality from an application model as graphical components in a GUI, rather than on retroactively attaching functionality to manually added graphical components. The inverted GUI development approach is supported in two steps. First, we design a language for describing GUIs, and implement interpreters that communicate with remotely hosted application models and render GUI descriptions as fully functional GUIs. Second, we implement a graphical editor for developing GUIs in order to make the language more accessible.The presented solution is evaluated by its application in a number of research projects in the domain of e-health. From the GUIs developed in those projects, we conclude that the GUI language is practically viable for building full-blown, professional grade GUIs. Furthermore, the presented graphical editor is evaluated by direct comparison to a market leading product in a controlled experiment. From this, we conclude that the editor is accessible to new users, and that it can be more efficient to use than the commercial alternative

Internet-of-Things (IoT) for Human Thermal Comfort: A Simulative Investigation

Human thermal comfort is very important especially in an indoor environment as it can influence human’s health and welfare. In tropical countries like Malaysia, air conditioning system has become a necessary tool in creating a thermally comfortable ambience in an indoor environment. However, the current control mechanism of the system would allow the user to set into maximum cooling – at minimum temperature with maximum fan speed – which not only consumes more energy, but is not creating a thermally comfortable environment as well, as extreme coolness could also bring negative effect towards the human. Therefore, it is essential to integrate human thermal comfort factor into air conditioning system control as well. This paper will highlight the possibility of integrating thermal comfort control into air conditioning system in creating a comfortable indoor environment. It adopts an enhanced version of Predictive Mean Vote (PMV) approach, specifically in creating thermal comfort ambience for a small sedentary work-based indoor space, in tropical countries. As the Internet-of-Things has become a trend in the smart home application, its element is also integrated here, where an Android-based application is developed and tested towards controlling a hardware simulative model which represents an air conditioning system based on the user-defined PMV value. It is shown that the application is able to control the fan speed and temperature through the LED brightness as demanded by the user. It is not only expected to work with a real air conditioning system in the future to create a thermally comfortable environment, but could also allow the system to be operated in energy and cost-efficient manner

How do Developers Test Android Applications?

Enabling fully automated testing of mobile applications has recently become an important topic of study for both researchers and practitioners. A plethora of tools and approaches have been proposed to aid mobile developers both by augmenting manual testing practices and by automating various parts of the testing process. However, current approaches for automated testing fall short in convincing developers about their benefits, leading to a majority of mobile testing being performed manually. With the goal of helping researchers and practitioners - who design approaches supporting mobile testing - to understand developer's needs, we analyzed survey responses from 102 open source contributors to Android projects about their practices when performing testing. The survey focused on questions regarding practices and preferences of developers/testers in-the-wild for (i) designing and generating test cases, (ii) automated testing practices, and (iii) perceptions of quality metrics such as code coverage for determining test quality. Analyzing the information gleaned from this survey, we compile a body of knowledge to help guide researchers and professionals toward tailoring new automated testing approaches to the need of a diverse set of open source developers.Comment: 11 pages, accepted to the Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME'17

Framework for supporting JavaScript-Based Mobile Agents

The evolution of technology in interconnection solutions, such as networks or the Internet, and the emergence both of wireless sensors networks and distributed systems allowed many communication architectures to appear, being the Client-server architecture the most common. Here, we present a dissertation work about the mobile agents computing paradigm. A middleware and a mobile agent framework have been developed using the JavaScript language that allows the development, execution and the ability to move JavaScript mobile agents through the local network and Internet using Node.js for desktop operating systems and React Native for mobile operating systems, such as Android and iOS. This initiative arose as a way of dealing with problems raised by the considerable amount of existing Java based mobile agents platforms, which force the installation of the Java Virtual Machine on the devices, making complicated its execution in operating systems like macOS, iOS and others operating systems not compatible with Java

Constraining application behaviour by generating languages

Writing a platform for reactive applications which enforces operational constraints is difficult, and has been approached in various ways. In this experience report, we detail an approach using an embedded DSL which can be used to specify the structure and permissions of a program in a given application domain. Once the developer has specified which components an application will consist of, and which permissions each one needs, the specification itself evaluates to a new, tailored, language. The final implementation of the application is then written in this specialised environment where precisely the API calls associated with the permissions which have been granted, are made available. Our prototype platform targets the domain of mobile computing, and is implemented using Racket. It demonstrates resource access control (e.g., camera, address book, etc.) and tries to prevent leaking of private data. Racket is shown to be an extremely effective platform for designing new programming languages and their run-time libraries. We demonstrate that this approach allows reuse of an inter-component communication layer, is convenient for the application developer because it provides high-level building blocks to structure the application, and provides increased control to the platform owner, preventing certain classes of errors by the developer.Comment: 8 pages, 8th European Lisp Symposiu

IoT Notifications: from disruption to benefit - Architectures for the future of notifications in the IoT

The growing number of mobile and IoT devices able to generate and show incoming notifications is fostering the spread of notifications in people lives. Nonetheless, although users are getting used to them, their presence is not always perceived as a benefit by recipients. With the aim of improving user experience with notifications, two different approaches are presented in this dissertation. The former acts at the distribution level, i.e., notifications are intercepted and then a system decides if, when, and how to show them; while the latter acts at the design level, i.e., notifications and their distribution strategies are designed with the aim of reducing user disruption and exploiting all the benefits that the availability of multiple devices could bring. An IoT architecture is proposed for each approach: the Smart Notification System that relies on machine learning algorithms to adequately manage incoming notifications, and the XDN (Cross-Device Notification) framework that assists developers in creating cross-device notifications by scripting. The modular nature of both architectures allowed the simultaneous development and test of different independent but compatible subsystems and their exploitation in preliminary deployment sessions. The results, feedbacks and lessons learned from such sessions can foster the development of future solutions in the IoT notifications field and related domains