Doctoral Thesis Investigating Performance Issues in Mobile Apps PhD Program in Computer Science: XXX cycle Supervisor Prof Massimiliano Di Penta Author:
[email protected] Teerath Das
[email protected] Co-supervisor Ivano Malavolta
[email protected] February 2020 GSSI Gran Sasso Science Institute Viale Francesco Crispi, 7 - 67100 L'Aquila - Italy Abstract The world is moving at a dynamic pace, and this has led to the technological advance- ment of mobile applications. This rise in the advancement of the mobile application comes with critical concerns to end-users in terms of the performance, especially when implementing high intensive features. Moreover, enjoyable user experience in terms of performance is often considered as the main parameter to measure the success of any app. Poor implementation of source code, lack of developers knowledge, and time con- straints on resolving performance issues are few of the major potential performance drawbacks in Android applications. To overcome these performance issues, in this dissertation, we focus on investigating the performance-related issues in open-source Android application (mainly apps from GitHub). Our thesis can be divided into four key research objectives: (i) initially we investigate on the extent to which developers consider performance issues in their com- mits (while maintaining their apps) and how they document it, (ii) to complement this study, we conduct an experiment to study the evolution of Android specific performance issues detected by Android Lint, and based on the obtained results, (iii) we introduce an Eclipse plugin that can be used to automatically resolve seven types of performance- related issues detected by Android Lint; in addition to this, we performed a survey-based study to analyze the self assessed performance refactoring code of the proposed tool from the developers' perspective; and (iv) we design and conduct a measurement-based study to examine the impact of performance violations at run-time.