Related papers: Investigating Software Developers' Challenges for …
Mocking is a common unit testing technique that is used to simplify tests, reduce flakiness, and improve coverage by replacing real dependencies with simplified implementations. Despite its widespread use in Open Source Software projects,…
Many Android applications collect data from users. When they do, they must protect this collected data according to the current legal frameworks. Such data protection has become even more important since the European Union rolled out the…
Access to privacy-sensitive information on Android is a growing concern in the mobile community. Albeit Google Play recently introduced some privacy guidelines, it is still an open problem to soundly verify whether apps actually comply with…
We performed two online surveys of Stack Overflow answerers and visitors to assess their awareness to outdated code and software licenses in Stack Overflow answerers. The answerer survey targeted 607 highly reputed Stack Overflow users and…
Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) blend the advantages of web and native apps, offering features like offline access, push notifications, and installability. Beyond these, modern PWAs are increasingly granted system-level capabilities…
Low-code software development (LCSD) is an emerging paradigm that combines minimal source code with interactive graphical interfaces to promote rapid application development. LCSD aims to democratize application development to software…
Android apps are built on APIs that abstract core Android system functionalities. These APIs are officially documented in multiple files distributed with the Android source code or SDK, which we collectively refer to as Android API Lists…
Stack Overflow (SO) is a popular platform among developers seeking advice on various software-related topics, including privacy and security. As for many knowledge-sharing websites, the value of SO depends largely on users' engagement,…
Performance issues in Android applications significantly undermine users' experience, engagement, and retention, which is a long-lasting research topic in academia. Unlike functionality issues, performance issues are more difficult to…
AI Agents have rapidly gained prominence in both research and industry as systems that extend large language models with planning, tool use, memory, and goal-directed action. Despite this progress, the development and maintenance of Agent…
Since last decade, smartphones have become an integral part of everyone's life. Having the ability to handle many useful and attractive applications, smartphones sport flawless functionality and small sizes leading to their exponential…
Bug reports document unexpected behaviors in software, enabling developers to understand, validate, and fix bugs. Unfortunately, a significant portion of bug reports is of low quality, which poses challenges for developers in terms of…
This paper investigates changes over time in the behavior of Android ad libraries. Taking a sample of 100,000 apps, we extract and classify the ad libraries. By considering the release dates of the applications that use a specific ad…
The Workflows as Code paradigm is becoming increasingly essential to streamline the design and management of complex processes within data-intensive software systems. These systems require robust capabilities to process, analyze, and…
The security of Android has been recently challenged by the discovery of a number of vulnerabilities involving different layers of the Android stack. We argue that such vulnerabilities are largely related to the interplay among layers…
The industry for children's apps is thriving at the cost of children's privacy: these apps routinely disclose children's data to multiple data trackers and ad networks. As children spend increasing time online, such exposure accumulates to…
Stack Overflow and other similar forums are used commonly by developers to seek answers for their software development as well as privacy-related concerns. Recently, ChatGPT has been used as an alternative to generate code or produce…
Recent industrial and academic research has focused on data-driven analytics with smartphones by collecting user interaction, context, and device systems data through Application Programming interfaces (APIs) and sensors. The Android OS…
The Google Play marketplace has introduced the Data Safety section to improve transparency regarding how mobile applications (apps) collect, share, and protect user data. This mechanism requires developers to disclose privacy and…
The package manager (PM) is crucial to most technology stacks, acting as a broker to ensure that a verified dependency package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an application. Diversity in technology stacks has led to…