A Visual Software Analytics Platform for Mobile Applications

MOA AS

Roberto Minelli and Michele LanzaREVEAL @ Faculty of Informatics – University of Lugano, Switzerland

SoftwareAnalytics

Mobile Applicationsfor

SoftwareAnalytics

Mobile Applicationsfor

Explore and analyze the data to obtain

insightful information about software systems,

users, and software development process.

SoftwareAnalytics

Explore and analyze the data to obtain

insightful information about software systems,

users, and software development process.

Mobile Applications

Software systemsaimed at smartphones,

tablet PCs, and other handheld devices

for

The world of apps is heterogeneous

ProgrammingLanguages

AppStores

$4.5 billionsin 2009

$17.5 billionsin 2012

$25 billionsin 2015

Software systemsaimed at smartphones, tablet PCs, and other

handheld devices

Mobile Applications

Apps evolve

Maintenance is crucial

Existing approaches were devised before apps existed

oftware nalyticsfor bile pplicationsMO

AA

S

R. Minelli and M. Lanza“Soware Analytics for Mobile Applications

Insights & Lessons Learned” CSMR 2013

MOA AShttp://samoa.inf.usi.ch

DEMO

Delta with largest snapshot in history

Number ofexternal calls

Number of internal calls

The whole app (in terms of LOC)

The CORELOC Other LOC Activity Main Activity

DefaultMain Activity Service

Phantom Element

Core Circle Colors

Call Ring Colors

Android calls Java calls

JavaX calls Apache calls

Unclassified callsAll other calls

The White Ring

The App Circle

The Core Circle

The Call Ring

The History Circle

Insights & Lessons Learned

Violating guidelines

“[...] an application usually consists of multiple activities that are loosely bound to each other. Typically, one activity in an application is specified as the "main" activity, which is presented to the user when launching the application for the first time”.

In case of multiple main activities, developers have to specify in the manifest a default Activity.

Core Circle ColorsActivityMain Activity

ServicePhantom element

Default Main Activity

Violating guidelines

Use of third-party APIs

Java project

Source code

Use of third-party APIs

Java project

Source code

Use of third-party APIs

Java project

Source code

...

- 2.3kLOC

+ 7 kLOC

Use of third-party APIs

SoftwareAnalytics

Mobile Applicationsfor

Software systemsaimed at smartphones, tablet PCs, and other

handheld devices

Mobile Applications

Maintenance is crucial

Apps evolve

Insights & Lessons Learned

R. Minelli and M. Lanza“Soware Analytics for Mobile Applications –

Insights & Lessons Learned” CSMR 2013

MOA AShttp://samoa.inf.usi.ch

FRONT-ENDBACK-END

SVNSVNSVNSVN

Data acquisition

Java SVN crawler

Source code model extraction

MSE generatorAST generator

MSE parserAST parser

Metrics extraction

AST-based metrics

MSE-based metrics

JSON Files

SAMOA

d3.jsJSON retrieval

HTML/CSSJavaScript/jQuery/PHP

Internet