1,536 research outputs found
Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development
Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern
software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user
base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software
development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific
challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from
developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a
program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we
reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems
in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help
guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we
provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference
on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18
An App Performance Optimization Advisor for Mobile Device App Marketplaces
On mobile phones, users and developers use apps official marketplaces serving
as repositories of apps. The Google Play Store and Apple Store are the official
marketplaces of Android and Apple products which offer more than a million
apps. Although both repositories offer description of apps, information
concerning performance is not available. Due to the constrained hardware of
mobile devices, users and developers have to meticulously manage the resources
available and they should be given access to performance information about
apps. Even if this information was available, the selection of apps would still
depend on user preferences and it would require a huge cognitive effort to make
optimal decisions. Considering this fact we propose APOA, a recommendation
system which can be implemented in any marketplace for helping users and
developers to compare apps in terms of performance.
APOA uses as input metric values of apps and a set of metrics to optimize. It
solves an optimization problem and it generates optimal sets of apps for
different user's context. We show how APOA works over an Android case study.
Out of 140 apps, we define typical usage scenarios and we collect measurements
of power, CPU, memory, and network usages to demonstrate the benefit of using
APOA.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figure
Testing the Limits: Unusual Text Inputs Generation for Mobile App Crash Detection with Large Language Model
Mobile applications have become a ubiquitous part of our daily life,
providing users with access to various services and utilities. Text input, as
an important interaction channel between users and applications, plays an
important role in core functionality such as search queries, authentication,
messaging, etc. However, certain special text (e.g., -18 for Font Size) can
cause the app to crash, and generating diversified unusual inputs for fully
testing the app is highly demanded. Nevertheless, this is also challenging due
to the combination of explosion dilemma, high context sensitivity, and complex
constraint relations. This paper proposes InputBlaster which leverages the LLM
to automatically generate unusual text inputs for mobile app crash detection.
It formulates the unusual inputs generation problem as a task of producing a
set of test generators, each of which can yield a batch of unusual text inputs
under the same mutation rule. In detail, InputBlaster leverages LLM to produce
the test generators together with the mutation rules serving as the reasoning
chain, and utilizes the in-context learning schema to demonstrate the LLM with
examples for boosting the performance. InputBlaster is evaluated on 36 text
input widgets with cash bugs involving 31 popular Android apps, and results
show that it achieves 78% bug detection rate, with 136% higher than the best
baseline. Besides, we integrate it with the automated GUI testing tool and
detect 37 unseen crashes in real-world apps from Google Play.Comment: Accepted by IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
2024 (ICSE 2024
An Empirical Study on the Impact of Deep Parameters on Mobile App Energy Usage
Improving software performance through configuration parameter tuning is a common activity during software maintenance. Beyond traditional performance metrics like latency, mobile app developers are interested in reducing app energy usage. Some mobile apps have centralized locations for parameter tuning, similar to databases and operating systems, but it is common for mobile apps to have hundreds of parameters scattered around the source code. The correlation between these deep parameters and app energy usage is unclear. Researchers have studied the energy effects of deep parameters in specific modules, but we lack a systematic understanding of the energy impact of mobile deep parameters.
In this paper we empirically investigate this topic, combining a developer survey with systematic energy measurements. Our motivational survey of 25 Android developers suggests that developers do not understand, and largely ignore, the energy impact of deep parameters. To assess the potential implications of this practice, we propose a deep parameter energy profiling framework that can analyze the energy impact of deep parameters in an app. Our framework identifies deep parameters, mutates them based on our parameter value selection scheme, and performs reliable energy impact analysis. Applying the framework to 16 popular Android apps, we discovered that deep parameter-induced energy inefficiency is rare. We found only 2 out of 1644 deep parameters for which a different value would significantly improve its app\u27s energy efficiency. A detailed analysis found that most deep parameters have either no energy impact, limited energy impact, or an energy impact only under extreme values. Our study suggests that it is generally safe for developers to ignore the energy impact when choosing deep parameter values in mobile apps
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