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We conducted a qualitative study to investigate the main aspects related to the development and management of applications (or apps) for smart and mobile devices. This investigation is composed of two main steps and its context is the software industry. In the first step, we interviewed software managers with experience in the context of app development and management. This part of our study can be intended as explorative because we used its outcomes to plan and execute the second step of our study, namely a survey with software professionals. From this survey, we obtained a number of findings that we can summarize as follows: (i) app development is mostly done by junior developers; (ii) agile methodologies and cross-platform development frameworks are largely adopted even if there are no approaches and frameworks considered the best; (iii) support for testing is considered inadequate; (iv) fragmentation of software and hardware is perceived an important concern; and (v) app development is considered different from the development of web/desktop applications. Based on our findings, we highlight areas that require more attention from the research and the industry

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This paper presents the research results of an ongoing technology transfer project carried out in cooperation between the University of Salerno and a small software company. The project is aimed at developing and transferring migration technology to the industrial partner. The partner should be enabled to migrate monolithic multi-user COBOL legacy systems to a multi-tier Web-based architecture. The assessment of the legacy systems of the partner company revealed that these systems had a very low level of decomposability with spaghetti-like code and embedded control flow and database accesses within the user interface descriptions. For this reason, it was decided to adopt an incremental migration strategy based on the reengineering of the user interface using Web technology, on the transformation of interactive legacy programs into batch programs, and the wrapping of the legacy programs. A middleware framework links the new Web-based user interface with the Wrapped Legacy System. An Eclipse plug-in, named MELIS (migration environment for legacy information systems), was also developed to support the migration process. Both the migration strategy and the tool have been applied to two essential subsystems of the most business critical legacy system of the partner company.

We propose a tool to identify and analyze cloned patterns in Web applications using clone analysis and clustering of static and dynamic Web pages. The tool first detects cloned pages, which are then grouped into clusters as well as the groups of links between clusters. In this way the navigational schema is simplified and the duplicated functionalities corresponding to cloned navigational patterns can be more easily analyzed. The tool also allows filtering out uninteresting parts of the restructured navigational schema, thus to further improve the understanding