What is an app store? The software engineering perspective

“App stores” are online software stores where end users may browse, purchase, download, and install software applications. By far, the best known app stores are associated with mobile platforms, such as Google Play for Android and Apple’s App Store for iOS. The ubiquity of smartphones has led to mobile app stores becoming a touchstone...

Challenges in Applying Continuous Experimentation: A Practitioners' Perspective

Background: Applying Continuous Experimentation on a large scale is not easily achieved. Although the evolution within large tech organisations is well understood, we still lack a good understanding of how to transition a company towards applying more experiments. Objective: This study investigates how practitioners define, value and apply...

Hybrid Multi-level Crossover for Unit Test Case Generation

State-of-the-art search-based approaches for test case generation work at test case level, where tests are represented as sequences of statements. These approaches make use of genetic operators (i.e., mutation and crossover) that create test variants by adding, altering, and removing statements from existing tests. While this encoding schema has...

Selecting third-party libraries: The practitioners' perspective

The selection of third-party libraries is an essential element of virtually any software development project. However, deciding which libraries to choose is a challenging practical problem. Selecting the wrong library can severely impact a software project in terms of cost, time, and development effort, with the severity of the impact depending...

Discovering Community Patterns in Open-Source: A Systematic Approach and Its Evaluation

“There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.” - [M. Scott Peck]<br/><br/>The open-source phenomenon has reached the point in which it is virtually impossible to find large applications that do not rely on it. Such grand adoption may...

An Empirical Catalog of Code Smells for the Presentation Layer of Android Apps

Software developers, including those of the Android mobile platform, constantly seek to improve their applications’ maintainability and evolvability. Code smells are commonly used for this purpose, as they indicate symptoms of design problems. However, although the literature presents a variety of code smells, such as God Class and Long...

A security perspective on code review: The case of Chromium

Modern Code Review (MCR) is an established software development process that aims to improve software quality. Although evidence showed that higher levels of review coverage relates to less post-release bugs, it remains unknown the effectiveness of MCR at specifically finding security issues. We present a work we conduct aiming to fill that gap...

An Industrial Evaluation of Technological Support for Overhearing Conversations in Global Software Engineering

Software engineering is by nature a highly collaborative activity. However, collaborating effectively in Global Software Engineering, in which team members are geographically, temporally and/or socio-culturally separated from each other, is more difficult. In a traditional co-located setting, one of the most important communication patterns is a...