A graph-based dataset of commit history of real-world Android apps

Geiger, Franz-Xaver; Malavolta, Ivano; Pascarella, Luca; Palomba, Fabio; Nucci, Dario Di; Bacchelli, Alberto

doi:10.1145/3196398.3196460

Cited by 50 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…This will require an in-depth analysis of the commit logs in order to trace, for each issue, its inducing commits, its changes of location within the repository, and its issue-resolution commit. Moreover, we are planning to investigate on how the maintainability issue evolution trends compare between different static code analysis tools and on a larger dataset of GitHub repositories such as the one in [46]. Finally, we will select a subset of representative apps, build and fine tune prediction models for their maintainability issues (e.g., by using ARIMA), and assess the accuracy of those models in predicting how maintainability issues evolve in the future.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Maintainability Issues of Android Apps Evolve

Malavolta

Verdecchia

Filipovic

et al. 2018

2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

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Context. Android is the largest mobile platform today, with thousands of apps published and updated in the Google Play store everyday. Maintenance is an important factor in Android apps lifecycle, as it allows developers to constantly improve their apps and better tailor them to their user base. Goal. In this paper we investigate the evolution of various maintainability issues along the lifetime of Android apps. Method. We designed and conducted an empirical study on 434 GitHub repositories containing open, real (i.e., published in the Google Play store), and actively maintained Android apps. We statically analyzed 9,945 weekly snapshots of all apps for identifying their maintainability issues over time. We also identified maintainability hotspots along the lifetime of Android apps according to how their density of maintainability issues evolves over time. More than 2,000 GitHub commits belonging to identified hotspots have been manually categorized to understand the context in which maintainability hotspots occur. Results. Our results shed light on (i) how often various types of maintainability issues occur over the lifetime of Android apps, (ii) the evolution trends of the density of maintainability issues in Android apps, and (iii) an in-depth characterization of development activities related to maintainability hotspots. Together, these results can help Android developers in (i) better planning code refactoring sessions, (ii) better planning their code review sessions (e.g., steering the assignment of code reviews), and (iii) taking special care of their code quality when performing tasks belonging to activities highly correlated with maintainability issues. We also support researchers by objectively characterizing the state of the practice about maintainability of Android apps. Conclusions. Independently from the type of development activity, maintainability issues grow until they stabilize, but are never fully resolved.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Maintainability Issues of Android Apps Evolve

Malavolta

Verdecchia

Filipovic

et al. 2018

2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

Self Cite

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“…However, we did not have access to any proprietary software that can serve this study. We also encourage future studies to consider other datasets of open-source apps to extend this study [16], [32]. Another possible threat is that our study only concerns 8 Android-specific code smells.…”

Section: B Threats To Validitymentioning

confidence: 98%

On the Survival of Android Code Smells in the Wild

Habchi

Rouvoy

Moha

2019

2019 IEEE/ACM 6th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft)

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The success of smartphones and app stores have contributed to the explosion of the number of mobile apps proposed to end-users. In this very competitive market, developers are rushed to regularly release new versions of their apps in order to retain users. Under such pressure, app developers may be tempted to adopt bad design or implementation choices, leading to the introduction of code smells. Mobile-specific code smells represent a real concern in mobile software engineering. Many studies have proposed tools to automatically detect their presence and quantify their impact on performance. However, there remains-so far-no evidence about the lifespan of these code smells in the history of mobile apps. In this paper, we present the first large-scale empirical study that investigates the survival of Android code smells. This study covers 8 types of Android code smells, 324 Android apps, 255k commits, and the history of 180k code smell instances. Our study reports that while in terms of time Android code smells can remain in the codebase for years before being removed, it only takes 34 effective commits to remove 75% of them. Also, Android code smells disappear faster in bigger projects with higher releasing trends. Finally, we observed that code smells that are detected and prioritised by linters tend to disappear before other code smells.

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“…However, we did not have access to any proprietary software that can serve this study. We also encourage future studies to consider other datasets of open-source apps to extend this study [16], [33]. Another possible threat is that our study only concerns 8 Android-specific code smells.…”

Section: B Threats To Validitymentioning

confidence: 98%

The Rise of Android Code Smells: Who is to Blame?

Habchi

Moha

Rouvoy

2019

2019 IEEE/ACM 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

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The rise of mobile apps as new software systems led to the emergence of new development requirements regarding performance. Development practices that do not respect these requirements can seriously hinder app performances and impair user experience, they qualify as code smells. Mobile code smells are generally associated with inexperienced developers who lack knowledge about the framework guidelines. However, this assumption remains unverified and there is no evidence about the role played by developers in the accrual of mobile code smells. In this paper, we therefore study the contributions of developers related to Android code smells. To support this study, we propose SNIFFER, an open-source toolkit that mines Git repositories to extract developers' contributions as code smell histories. Using SNIFFER, we analysed 255k commits from the change history of 324 Android apps. We found that the ownership of code smells is spread across developers regardless of their seniority. There are no distinct groups of code smell introducers and removers. Developers who introduce and remove code smells are mostly the same.

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A graph-based dataset of commit history of real-world Android apps

Cited by 50 publications

References 16 publications

How Maintainability Issues of Android Apps Evolve

How Maintainability Issues of Android Apps Evolve

On the Survival of Android Code Smells in the Wild

The Rise of Android Code Smells: Who is to Blame?

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