Logging Practices with Mobile Analytics

An Empirical Study on Firebase

Conference paper (2021)

Authors

Julian Harty The Open University
Haonan Zhang Concordia University
Lili Wei The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
L. Pascarella Università della Svizzera Italiana
Maurício Aniche Software Engineering - EEMCS
Weiyi Shang Concordia University
Research Group
Software Engineering (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2021 Julian Harty, Haonan Zhang, Lili Wei, L. Pascarella, Maurício Aniche, Weiyi Shang
DOI
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https://doi.org/10.1109/MobileSoft52590.2021.00013
Empirical software engineering Logging engineering Mobile analytics Mobile software development Software monitoring
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Published Date

2021

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Software Engineering

Abstract

Software logs are of great value in both industrial and open-source projects. Mobile analytics logging enables developers to collect logs remotely from their apps running on end user devices at the cost of recording and transmitting logs across the Internet to a centralised infrastructure.This paper makes a first step in characterising logging practices with a widely adopted mobile analytics logging library, namely Firebase Analytics. We provide an empirical evaluation of the use of Firebase Analytics in 57 open-source Android applications by studying the evolution of code-bases to understand: a) the needs-in-common that push practitioners to adopt logging practices on mobile devices, and b) the differences in the ways developers use local and remote logging.Our results indicate mobile analytics logs are less pervasive and less maintained than traditional logging code. Based on our analysis, we believe logging using mobile analytics is more user centered compared to traditional logging, where the latter is mainly used to record information for debugging purposes.