Every bit of technology is evolving and will continue to do so. Mobile applications, in particular, represent today one of the main evolution in technology. They are now widely used in different sectors. The mobile app ecosystem represents today one of the biggest industries all over the world. It encapsulates millions of app developers, literally billions of smartphone owners who use mobile apps daily and many companies that uses apps and make money with them. This evolution of mobile software requires more attention, more skills and a better comprehension for the development, maintenance and engineering of applications. Due to this evolution and to the growing presence of mobile application in everyday life, we though to analyse mobile context and mobile development process to study if a specific UML extension could facilitate development and maintenance of Android mobile application process. The idea was to model, extending UML standard Class Diagram objects, Android structural and UI components and provide a more specific diagram, and to support development process in all phases. We proposed an UML extension with graphical stereotype to represent information and try to increase the domain comprehension. In this work, after anlaysing mobile applications modeling ad developing issues, we studied Android, iOS and cross platform development. Considering UML standard and extension mechanism, we proposed and evaluated a Droid UML extension. We carried out a controlled experiment defining two maintenance tasks for two open source applications. We submitted surveys to 20 developers, divided in 4 groups with different tasks and UML representation and we analysed results. The obtained data told us that using a specific UML extension could improve code comprehension and could facilitate maintenance activities. In future we think to repeat so the experiment with a larger number of developers to confirm the obtained results and we will realize a tool to automatically define Droid UML class diagrams. Further-more we think to propose a UML extension for cross platform developed applications.

Mobile application development process analysis and proposal of a specific UML extension for Android applications

VALENTE, Roberto
2019-04-08

Abstract

Every bit of technology is evolving and will continue to do so. Mobile applications, in particular, represent today one of the main evolution in technology. They are now widely used in different sectors. The mobile app ecosystem represents today one of the biggest industries all over the world. It encapsulates millions of app developers, literally billions of smartphone owners who use mobile apps daily and many companies that uses apps and make money with them. This evolution of mobile software requires more attention, more skills and a better comprehension for the development, maintenance and engineering of applications. Due to this evolution and to the growing presence of mobile application in everyday life, we though to analyse mobile context and mobile development process to study if a specific UML extension could facilitate development and maintenance of Android mobile application process. The idea was to model, extending UML standard Class Diagram objects, Android structural and UI components and provide a more specific diagram, and to support development process in all phases. We proposed an UML extension with graphical stereotype to represent information and try to increase the domain comprehension. In this work, after anlaysing mobile applications modeling ad developing issues, we studied Android, iOS and cross platform development. Considering UML standard and extension mechanism, we proposed and evaluated a Droid UML extension. We carried out a controlled experiment defining two maintenance tasks for two open source applications. We submitted surveys to 20 developers, divided in 4 groups with different tasks and UML representation and we analysed results. The obtained data told us that using a specific UML extension could improve code comprehension and could facilitate maintenance activities. In future we think to repeat so the experiment with a larger number of developers to confirm the obtained results and we will realize a tool to automatically define Droid UML class diagrams. Further-more we think to propose a UML extension for cross platform developed applications.
8-apr-2019
Android; Mobile development; UML extension; Mobile modeling applications
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11695/90880
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