Software architectural principles in contemporary mobile software: from conception to practice

Bagheri, Hamid; Garcia, Joshua; Sadeghi, Alireza; Malek, Sam; Medvidović, Nenad

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2016.05.039

Cited by 21 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…This suggests that BitcoinWallet is required to handle a greater amount of user-interaction and a smaller amount of actual transactional services, whereas K-9 Mail has a greater focus on building business mailing services. This is aligned with a finding from the paper [210] by Bagheri et al The authors, via studying a set of 200 Android applications in Google Play store, found out that Android applications in different domains have different architecture characteristics regarding type and number of components. In particular, finance apps, such as BitcoinWallet and other banking or payment systems, provide richer user-interface compared to the other kinds of apps.…”

Section: Using Role Stereotypes For Profiling Software Design Intentisupporting

confidence: 82%

An Automated Approach for Classifying Reverse-Engineered and Forward-Engineered UML Class Diagrams

Osman

Ho-Quang

Chaudron

2018

2018 44th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)

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Context: In modern software development, software modeling is considered to be an essential part of the software architecture and design activities. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has become the de facto standard for software modeling in industry. Surprisingly, there are only a few empirical studies on the practices and impacts of UML modeling in software development. This is mainly due to the lack of empirical data on real-life software systems that use UML modeling. Objective: This PhD thesis contributes to this matter by describing a method to build and curate a big corpus of open-source-software (OSS) projects that contain UML models. Subsequently, this thesis offers observations on the practices and impacts of using UML modeling in these OSS projects. Method: We combine techniques from repository mining and image classification in order to successfully identify more than 24.000 open source projects on GitHub that together contain more than 93.000 UML models. Machine learning techniques are also used to enrich the corpus with annotations. Finally, various empirical studies, including a case study, a user study, a large-scale survey and an experiment, have been carried out across this set of projects. Result: The results show that UML is generally perceived to be helpful to new contributors. The most important motivation for using UML seems to be to facilitate collaboration. In particular, teams use UML during communication and planning of joint implementation efforts. Our study also shows that the use of UML modeling has a positive impact on software quality, i.e. it correlates with lower defect proneness. Further, we find out that visualisation of design concepts, such as class role-stereotypes, helps developers to perform better in software comprehension tasks.

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Section: Using Role Stereotypes For Profiling Software Design Intentisupporting

confidence: 82%

An Automated Approach for Classifying Reverse-Engineered and Forward-Engineered UML Class Diagrams

Osman

Ho-Quang

Chaudron

2018

2018 44th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)

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“…Proposed in the 90's, Component Oriented Programming is considered a proved technique for building modern software‐based systems. For instance, Bagheri et al argue that Android owes its success to many software architectural principles developed over the previous decade, including component orientation—which is at the core of the proposed methodology.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The study of software architectures and software architecture patterns has allowed software developers to conceive, design, implement, and maintain highly complex software systems. The academic rigour of pioneers working in the wider area of software architectures is even credited as a main enabler of the mobile app revolution we are experiencing today, evident by the widespread success of the Android platform …”

Section: Reference Architecturementioning

confidence: 99%

An MDD‐based method for building context‐aware applications with high reusability

Paspallis

2019

J Software Evolu Process

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Adding context -awareness capabilities to modern mobile and pervasive computing applications (apps) is becoming a mainstream activity in the software engineering community. In this respect, many context models and middleware architectures have been proposed with the aim to provide the developers with tools and abstractions that make it easier to produce context-aware applications. However, current solutions suffer from relatively low reusability and lack ease-of-use. In this paper, we propose a two-layer approach based on model-driven development: At the higher layer, we introduce the design of reusable context plug-ins, which can be used to monitor low-level context data and to infer higher-level information about the users, their computing infrastructure, and their interaction. At the lower layer, the plug-ins themselves are synthesized using more elementary, reusable components. We argue that this development approach provides significant advantages to the developers, as it enables them to design, implement, reuse, and maintain the codebase of context-aware apps more efficiently.To evaluate this approach, we demonstrate it in the context of a two-part example application and assess it both qualitatively and quantitatively. KEYWORDScode generation, context awareness, MDD, middleware, plug-in, reusability INTRODUCTIONContext awareness is one of the most sought-after features for modern mobile and pervasive computing applications. Understanding and using context allows applications to identify and predict intention, thus allowing for better and richer human-computer interaction.Researchers have proposed various approaches to ease the task of designing and implementing applications that are context-aware and self-adaptive. At their core, many of these build on reusable code, ranging from the early works of Dey 1 to more recent, plug-in-based architectures such as those described in the previous studies. 2-5 These approaches are designed to allow the applications, which are using them to inquire and access arbitrary context data types. In this respect, the context-awareness and context-inferring parts are separated from the functional logic of the applications by means of reusable context plug-ins (ie, individually deployable units, which provide mechanisms for collecting and processing context data, and inferring higher-level context information). At the same time, many context models and middleware architectures were proposed and documented in the literature. 6,7 Software reuse is at the core of many of those approaches. At a higher level, reuse covers all software engineering phases and ''can be supported by different types of methods, including ad hoc, opportunistic, adaptive, systematic, black-box, whitebox, etc.'' 8 A common drawback in these approaches is that the developers are required to invest a significant amount of time to develop customized components, which are used for collecting, processing, inferring, storing, querying, and accessing context data. Moreover, the developed components are then harder...

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“…Despite the wide diffusion of Android apps and their increasing complexity [18], at the time of writing we found a surprising low number of research studies about the architecture of mobile apps. By mining and reverse engineering the architecture of more than 1,400 Android apps, Bagheri et al studied the role of software architecture in the design and development of mobile software, extracted the architectural principles that have been applied by app developers, and identified architectural anti-patterns of the Android programming model [19]. They found that Android apps are complex, composed of tens of components, and organized according to multiple architectural styles.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Guidelines for Architecting Android Apps: A Mixed-Method Empirical Study

Verdecchia

Malavolta

Lago

2019

2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)

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For surviving in the highly competitive market of Android apps, it is fundamental for app developers to deliver apps of high quality and with short release times. A wellarchitected Android app is beneficial for developers, e.g. in terms of maintainability, testability, performance, and avoidance of resource leaks. However, how to properly architect Android apps is still debated and subject to conflicting opinions usually influenced by technological hypes rather than objective evidence. In this paper we present an empirical study on how developers architect Android apps, what architectural patterns and practices Android apps are based on, and their potential impact on quality. We apply a mixed-method empirical research design that combines (i) semi-structured interviews with Android practitioners in the field and (ii) a systematic analysis of both the grey (i.e., websites, on-line blogs) and white literature (i.e., academic studies) on the architecture of Android apps. Based on the analysis of the state of the art and practice about architecting Android apps, we systematically extract a set of 42 evidencebased guidelines supporting developers when architecting their Android apps.

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Software architectural principles in contemporary mobile software: from conception to practice

Cited by 21 publications

References 40 publications

An Automated Approach for Classifying Reverse-Engineered and Forward-Engineered UML Class Diagrams

An Automated Approach for Classifying Reverse-Engineered and Forward-Engineered UML Class Diagrams

An MDD‐based method for building context‐aware applications with high reusability

Guidelines for Architecting Android Apps: A Mixed-Method Empirical Study

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