193 research outputs found
Mobile app and app store analysis, testing and optimisation
This talk presents results on analysis and testing of mobile apps and app stores, reviewing the work of the UCL App Analysis Group (UCLappA) on App Store Mining and Analysis. The talk also covers the work of the UCL CREST centre on Genetic Improvement, applicable to app improvement and optimisation
Efficiently Manifesting Asynchronous Programming Errors in Android Apps
Android, the #1 mobile app framework, enforces the single-GUI-thread model,
in which a single UI thread manages GUI rendering and event dispatching. Due to
this model, it is vital to avoid blocking the UI thread for responsiveness. One
common practice is to offload long-running tasks into async threads. To achieve
this, Android provides various async programming constructs, and leaves
developers themselves to obey the rules implied by the model. However, as our
study reveals, more than 25% apps violate these rules and introduce
hard-to-detect, fail-stop errors, which we term as aysnc programming errors
(APEs). To this end, this paper introduces APEChecker, a technique to
automatically and efficiently manifest APEs. The key idea is to characterize
APEs as specific fault patterns, and synergistically combine static analysis
and dynamic UI exploration to detect and verify such errors. Among the 40
real-world Android apps, APEChecker unveils and processes 61 APEs, of which 51
are confirmed (83.6% hit rate). Specifically, APEChecker detects 3X more APEs
than the state-of-art testing tools (Monkey, Sapienz and Stoat), and reduces
testing time from half an hour to a few minutes. On a specific type of APEs,
APEChecker confirms 5X more errors than the data race detection tool,
EventRacer, with very few false alarms
Data-Driven Decisions and Actions in Today’s Software Development
Today’s software development is all about data: data about the software product itself, about the process and its different stages, about the customers and markets, about the development, the testing, the integration, the deployment, or the runtime aspects in the cloud. We use static and dynamic data of various kinds and quantities to analyze market feedback, feature impact, code quality, architectural design alternatives, or effects of performance optimizations. Development environments are no longer limited to IDEs in a desktop application or the like but span the Internet using live programming environments such as Cloud9 or large-volume repositories such as BitBucket, GitHub, GitLab, or StackOverflow. Software development has become “live” in the cloud, be it the coding, the testing, or the experimentation with different product options on the Internet. The inherent complexity puts a further burden on developers, since they need to stay alert when constantly switching between tasks in different phases. Research has been analyzing the development process, its data and stakeholders, for decades and is working on various tools that can help developers in their daily tasks to improve the quality of their work and their productivity. In this chapter, we critically reflect on the challenges faced by developers in a typical release cycle, identify inherent problems of the individual phases, and present the current state of the research that can help overcome these issues
User Review-Based Change File Localization for Mobile Applications
In the current mobile app development, novel and emerging DevOps practices
(e.g., Continuous Delivery, Integration, and user feedback analysis) and tools
are becoming more widespread. For instance, the integration of user feedback
(provided in the form of user reviews) in the software release cycle represents
a valuable asset for the maintenance and evolution of mobile apps. To fully
make use of these assets, it is highly desirable for developers to establish
semantic links between the user reviews and the software artefacts to be
changed (e.g., source code and documentation), and thus to localize the
potential files to change for addressing the user feedback. In this paper, we
propose RISING (Review Integration via claSsification, clusterIng, and
linkiNG), an automated approach to support the continuous integration of user
feedback via classification, clustering, and linking of user reviews. RISING
leverages domain-specific constraint information and semi-supervised learning
to group user reviews into multiple fine-grained clusters concerning similar
users' requests. Then, by combining the textual information from both commit
messages and source code, it automatically localizes potential change files to
accommodate the users' requests. Our empirical studies demonstrate that the
proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline work in terms of
clustering and localization accuracy, and thus produces more reliable results.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, 8 table
On the Automated Synthesis of Enterprise Integration Patterns to Adapt Choreography-based Distributed Systems
The Future Internet is becoming a reality, providing a large-scale computing
environments where a virtually infinite number of available services can be
composed so to fit users' needs. Modern service-oriented applications will be
more and more often built by reusing and assembling distributed services. A key
enabler for this vision is then the ability to automatically compose and
dynamically coordinate software services. Service choreographies are an
emergent Service Engineering (SE) approach to compose together and coordinate
services in a distributed way. When mismatching third-party services are to be
composed, obtaining the distributed coordination and adaptation logic required
to suitably realize a choreography is a non-trivial and error prone task.
Automatic support is then needed. In this direction, this paper leverages
previous work on the automatic synthesis of choreography-based systems, and
describes our preliminary steps towards exploiting Enterprise Integration
Patterns to deal with a form of choreography adaptation.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2015, arXiv:1512.0694
Large-Scale Analysis of Framework-Specific Exceptions in Android Apps
Mobile apps have become ubiquitous. For app developers, it is a key priority
to ensure their apps' correctness and reliability. However, many apps still
suffer from occasional to frequent crashes, weakening their competitive edge.
Large-scale, deep analyses of the characteristics of real-world app crashes can
provide useful insights to guide developers, or help improve testing and
analysis tools. However, such studies do not exist -- this paper fills this
gap. Over a four-month long effort, we have collected 16,245 unique exception
traces from 2,486 open-source Android apps, and observed that
framework-specific exceptions account for the majority of these crashes. We
then extensively investigated the 8,243 framework-specific exceptions (which
took six person-months): (1) identifying their characteristics (e.g.,
manifestation locations, common fault categories), (2) evaluating their
manifestation via state-of-the-art bug detection techniques, and (3) reviewing
their fixes. Besides the insights they provide, these findings motivate and
enable follow-up research on mobile apps, such as bug detection, fault
localization and patch generation. In addition, to demonstrate the utility of
our findings, we have optimized Stoat, a dynamic testing tool, and implemented
ExLocator, an exception localization tool, for Android apps. Stoat is able to
quickly uncover three previously-unknown, confirmed/fixed crashes in Gmail and
Google+; ExLocator is capable of precisely locating the root causes of
identified exceptions in real-world apps. Our substantial dataset is made
publicly available to share with and benefit the community.Comment: ICSE'18: the 40th International Conference on Software Engineerin
Towards optimal concolic testing
ACM Distinguished Paper Award</p
MuDelta: Delta-Oriented Mutation Testing at Commit Time
To effectively test program changes using mutation testing, one needs to use mutants that are relevant to the altered program behaviours. In view of this, we introduce MuDelta, an approach that identifies commit-relevant mutants; mutants that affect and are affected by the changed program behaviours. Our approach uses machine learning applied on a combined scheme of graph and vector-based representations of static code features. Our results, from 50 commits in 21 Coreutils programs, demonstrate a strong prediction ability of our approach; yielding 0.80 (ROC) and 0.50 (PR Curve) AUC values with 0.63 and 0.32 precision and recall values. These predictions are significantly higher than random guesses, 0.20 (PR-Curve) AUC, 0.21 and 0.21 precision and recall, and subsequently lead to strong relevant tests that kill 45%more relevant mutants than randomly sampled mutants (either sampled from those residing on the changed component(s) or from the changed lines). Our results also show that MuDelta selects mutants with 27% higher fault revealing ability in fault introducing commits. Taken together, our results corroborate the conclusion that commit-based mutation testing is suitable and promising for evolving software
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