Context: Android operating system always brings new releases and updates to improve security, increase performance and bring a better user experience. When Google announces a new release, a whole chain of changes is triggered in cascade, causing many compatibility issues. Objective: This study focus at performing a quantitative and qualitative analysis on the state of apps readiness for new Android releases over time. Method: We performed an empirical study to map apps readiness to different Android versions. We developed a Repository Mining Tool to analyse 8420 opensource repositories, detecting 2118 Android projects and when they were adapted to different Android versions along their lifetimes. Results: Our results show that Android apps have became "less ready" over time. We found that 76.45% of the analysed apps were ready for Android Lollipop 5.0 (API level 21) release, in October 2014. Though only 5.46% were ready for Android 10 (API level 29), in September 2019. In addition, our results show that when apps are adapted to an Android version, 59.41% perform the adaptation until the new Android release month, 95% are adapted twelve months after the release, and 99.16% are adapted two years later. Conclusion: Our findings reveal implications that affect not only the Android or mobile development research field and developers, they also reveal implications that points to Google's policies and Android final users as well.
Communication between practitioners is essential for the system's quality in the DevOps context. To improve this communication, practitioners often use informal diagrams to represent the components of a system. However, as systems evolve, it is a challenge to synchronize diagrams with production environments consistently. Hence, the inconsistency of architectural diagrams can affect communication between practitioner and their understanding of systems. In this paper, we propose the use of system descriptors to improve deployment diagram consistency. We state two main hypotheses: (1) if an architectural diagram is generated from a valid system descriptor, then the diagram is consistent; (2) if a valid system descriptor is generated from an architectural diagram, then the diagram is consistent. We report a case study to explore our hypotheses. Furthermore, we constructed a system descriptor from the Netflix deployment diagram, and we applied our tool to generate a new architectural diagram. Finally, we compare the original and generated diagrams to evaluate our proposal. Our case study shows all Docker compose description elements can be graphically represented in the generated architectural diagram, and the generated diagram does not present inconsistent aspects of the original diagram. Thus, our preliminary results lead to further evaluation in controlled and empirical experiments to test our hypotheses.
Android operating system introduces new releases frequently. This fact led to the existence of several Android Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which is one of the causes of the Android fragmentation phenomenon. As a consequence of fragmentation, many apps became not ready for new Android releases. Aiming at investigation of the readiness of Android apps, we developed a software repository mining tool to understand how ready apps are (and were) for Android releases. The tool tracks the changes of Android projects properties over time, contributing for a deeper analysis through collecting data since the beginning of the projects. It allows researchers to examine when exactly Android properties were changed, how many times they were changed, as well as all their values along time. This mechanism can support researchers to understand the evolution of Android projects and to answer research questions. In addition, developers can use the tool to track their apps evolution and perform comparisons and analysis with other open source apps. The tool can help developers to have a broader view of their apps evolution as well as to analyze competitor apps evolution.
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