The Green Lab - [13 B] Future research challenges

1 Het begint met een idee
Future research challenges
(within the Green Lab)
The Green Lab team

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Announcement
● Guest lecture by Alberto Bacchelli
○ VU Green Office http://www.greenofficevu.nl/
○ Room HG KC-18
○ Thursday October 20th, 11 AM
TOPIC: Mining software repositories

3
Roadmap
1. The hidden costs of 3rd party libraries in mobile web apps
2. Understanding how context-awareness is realized in mobile
apps
3. Hybrid mobile apps - a cross-store exploratory study
4. A cross-store study on performance-related commits in
mobile apps
5. An exploratory study on the usage of networking protocols in
mobile apps
6. Software Sustainability: A Systematic Mapping
7. Measuring the scientific impact of software
S2 group / Future research challenges

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The hidden costs of 3rd party libraries in mobile
web apps
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● Thousands of JavaScript libraries out there
● Every web developer uses them

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web apps
+ speed up the development process via code reuse
- may impact the performance and energy consumption
- download
- parsing
- execution
1

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web apps
1

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web apps
Main steps:
1. research questions formulation and experiment design
2. development of a generic slicing algorithm that reduces a
javaScript codebase to only the strictly needed functions
3. dataset building (~1000 real mobile web apps)
4. experiment execution
5. data analysis
6. reflection
Contacts: Ivano Malavolta, Giuseppe Procaccianti
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web apps
References
● Nejati, Javad, and Aruna Balasubramanian. "An in-depth study of mobile
browser performance." Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on
World Wide Web. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering
Committee, 2016.
● Thiagarajan, Narendran, et al. "Who killed my battery?: analyzing mobile
browser energy consumption." Proceedings of the 21st international conference
on World Wide Web. ACM, 2012.
1

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Understanding how context-awareness is realized
in mobile apps
● This app works in a specific context depending on the current
location of the user
context added value
2

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in mobile apps
CONTEXT
The mode, medium and environment in which users perform
their tasks
There are 3 different types of context:
● physical context
● media context
● modal context
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in mobile apps
2

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in mobile apps
THESIS
Exploration into how software developers extract contextual
information when developing mobile apps
DATASET: >10k real mobile apps (already mined)
TOOL: extract key parts of a mobile app where it is accessing the
context of its users
OUTPUT: catalogue of patterns of use of context + guidelines and
tactics for better considering contextual information in mobile apps
2

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in mobile apps
References
● Google Awareness API
○ https://developers.google.com/awareness
● Sentiance SDK
○ http://www.sentiance.com
Contacts: Ivano Malavolta, Edwin Hermkens (PharmIT)
2

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Hybrid mobile apps - a cross-store exploratory
study
3

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study
3

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study
3

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study
3

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study
3

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study
THESIS: to extend the performed study on iOS apps
Focus on
→ difference of ratings across stores (Google Play vs Apple)
→ difference of perceptions across the two types of users
○ value
○ performance
○ bugginess
○ size
3

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study
References
● Malavolta, Ivano, et al. "Hybrid mobile apps in the google play
store: An exploratory investigation." Mobile Software
Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft), 2015 2nd ACM
International Conference on. IEEE, 2015.
● Malavolta, Ivano, et al. "End Users' Perception of Hybrid Mobile
Apps in the Google Play Store." 2015 IEEE International
Conference on Mobile Services. IEEE, 2015.
Contact: Ivano Malavolta
3

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A cross-store study on performance-related
commits in mobile apps
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RQ1: To what extent developers consider performance issues
of Android apps?
RQ2: What are the concerns that developers have when
dealing with performance issues of Android apps?

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4
● Apps identification

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4
● Performance-related commits
Keyword-based approach:
wait, slow, fast, lag, tim, minor, stuck, instant, respons, react,
speed, latenc, perform, throughput, hang, memory, leak
Results:
535 candidate performance-related commits,
78 false positives
→ 457 true performance-related commits

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4

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THESIS: to extend the performed study on iOS apps
Focus on
→ different number of performance-related commits across
stores (Google Play vs Apple)?
→ different types of commits?
→ how much overlap among categories?
4

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References
● Das, Teerath, Massimiliano Di Penta, and Ivano Malavolta. "A
Quantitative and Qualitative Investigation of Performance-
Related Commits in Android Apps." International Conference on
Software Maintenance and Evaluation, IEEE, 2016.
Contact: Ivano Malavolta
4

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An exploratory study on the usage of networking
protocols in mobile apps
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Network
Recurrent protocols
● HTTP
● Web sockets
● ...

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● Every protocol has its features, e.g.:
○ HTTP1/HTTP2
■ many implementations
■ wide spread
■ authentication mechanisms already implemented
■ firewall-friendly
○ Web sockets
■ lightweight
■ bidirectional
■ full-duplex
5

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THESIS: to analyze a dataset of thousands of mobile apps w.r.t.
to their use of network protocols
TOOL: given a mobile app, analyzes it (statically), and extracts
all the used networking protocols
Goals
● understand how recently introduced protocols are used in
real projects (e.g., Google’s SPDY, web sockets, custom)
● Different protocols in different categories?
● Any other patterns to discover?
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References:
● Li, Ding, et al. "Automated energy optimization of HTTP requests
for mobile applications." Proceedings of the 38th International
Conference on Software Engineering. ACM, 2016.
Contacts: Ivano Malavolta, Fahimeh Alizadeh
5

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Software Sustainability: A Systematic Mapping
● What is Sustainable Software?
○ Software that consumes low energy
○ Software that performs well
○ Software that adapts and evolves over time
○ Software that is profitable
○ Software that takes care of its users
○ ….and much more
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● Systematic Mapping Study [1]
● Why?
○ A systematic mapping study provides a structure of the type
of research reports and results that have been published by
categorizing them
○ It requires less effort while providing a more coarse-grained
overview
○ recommended for research areas where there is a lack of
relevant, high-quality primary studies
[1] Petersen K, Feldt R, Mujtaba S. Systematic mapping studies in software engineering. in software engineering. isl.ce.yildiz.edu.tr; 2008;
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● Literature Study: Systematic search
○ Perform the search, identify primary studies
● THESIS: Systematic Mapping
○ Identify dimensions and domains
○ Perform the analysis
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● Contacts: Giuseppe Procaccianti, Patricia Lago
References:
● Penzenstadler, B., Raturi, A., Richardson, D., Calero, C.,
Femmer, H., & Franch, X. (2014). Systematic Mapping Study on
Software Engineering for Sustainability (SE4S). In Proceedings
of the 18th International Conference on Evaluation and
Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE 2014).

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Measuring the Scientific Impact of Software
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● Scientific Impact: measure in papers
○ ...but papers would not be possible without software!
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● How to measure the impact of software?
○ inconsistent citations
○ complex lifecycle

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● THESIS: quantify the impact and quality of scientific software
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● Focus:
○ define metrics and indicators
○ use already known metrics (e.g. reuse, repositories…)
● Contacts: Giuseppe Procaccianti, Willem van Hage (eScience)

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Next steps
● Assignment 3
○ Validity and execution
■ Sections 4 and 5 of your report
○ Submit on Blackboard by Wednesday, October 19th, 23.59h
● Assignment 4
○ Complete report
■ Results, discussion, conclusions
○ Submit on Blackboard by Thursday, November 3rd, 23.59h

The Green Lab - [13 B] Future research challenges

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