Related papers: Investigating Software Developers' Challenges for …
Code comments are important for program comprehension, development, and maintenance tasks. Given the varying standards for code comments, and their unstructured or semi-structured nature, developers get easily confused (especially novice…
Mobile devices encroach on almost every part of our lives, including work and leisure, and contain a wealth of personal and sensitive information. It is, therefore, imperative that these devices uphold high security standards. A key aspect…
Online services like Google provide a variety of application programming interfaces (APIs). These online APIs enable authenticated third-party services and applications (apps) to access a user's account data for tasks such as single sign-on…
The Android unrestricted application market, being of open source nature, has made it a popular platform for third-party applications reaching millions of smart devices in the world. This tremendous increase in applications with an…
Google's Android is a comprehensive software framework for mobile communication devices (i.e., smartphones, PDAs). The Android framework includes an operating system, middleware and a set of key applications. The incorporation of integrated…
Third-party tracking allows companies to collect users' behavioural data and track their activity across digital devices. This can put deep insights into users' private lives into the hands of strangers, and often happens without users'…
Recent studies observe that app foreground is the most striking component that influences the access control decisions in mobile platform, as users tend to deny permission requests lacking visible evidence. However, none of the existing…
The management of third-party package dependencies is crucial to most technology stacks, with package managers acting as brokers to ensure that a verified package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an application. Diversity…
Since Google unveiled Android OS for smartphones, malware are thriving with 3Vs, i.e. volume, velocity, and variety. A recent report indicates that one out of every five business/industry mobile application leaks sensitive personal data.…
Contemporary mobile applications (apps) are designed to track, use, and share users' data, often without their consent, which results in potential privacy and transparency issues. To investigate whether mobile apps have always been…
Well established libraries typically have API documentation. However, they frequently lack examples and explanations, possibly making difficult their effective reuse. Stack Overflow is a question-and-answer website oriented to issues…
Current software development takes advantage of many external libraries, but it entails security and copyright risks. While the use of the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) has been encouraged to cope with this problem, its adoption is…
Artificial Intelligence systems, which benefit from the availability of large-scale datasets and increasing computational power, have become effective solutions to various critical tasks, such as natural language understanding, speech…
XML configuration files are widely used in Android to define an app's user interface and essential runtime information such as system permissions. As Android evolves, it might introduce functional changes in the configuration environment,…
Android apps collecting data from users must comply with legal frameworks to ensure data protection. This requirement has become even more important since the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by the European…
Usable and secure authentication on the web and beyond is mission-critical. While password-based authentication is still widespread, users have trouble dealing with potentially hundreds of online accounts and their passwords. Alternatives…
Software workplaces are increasingly recognized as key spaces for professional development, where developers encounter various challenges in their roles, which they often discuss in online forums. This paper analyzes 47,368 posts on the…
Robots can greatly enhance human capabilities, yet their development presents a range of challenges. This collaborative study, conducted by a team of software engineering and robotics researchers, seeks to identify the challenges…
This paper presents a large-scale analysis of fingerprinting-like behavior in the mobile application ecosystem. We take a market-based approach, focusing on third-party tracking as enabled by applications' common use of third-party SDKs.…
To satisfy varying customer needs, device vendors and OS providers often rely on the open-source nature of the Android OS and offer customized versions of the Android OS. When a new version of the Android OS is released, device vendors and…