Collaborative Research: CCRI: Planning-C: An Infrastructure and Dataset for Research in Android Testing & Analysis

Given the importance of mobile applications (apps), researchers have dedicated considerable effort toward understanding, supporting, and automating mobile app development tasks. However, researchers looking to contribute to this area of work face several challenges related to building and maintaining tooling that can keep pace with the rapid evolution of mobile platforms (e.g., new Android updates) and the continuous process of mining apps and app-related data.

This project aims to carry out planning activities that will lead to the construction of a new shared community infrastructure for conducting mobile app development research. This infrastructure, called MODAL, will support work across the disciplines of software engineering (SE), computer security, and human-computer interaction (HCI) by offering various configurable components supporting key steps of the research process.

This project will (1) conduct a preliminary survey of the SE, computer security, and HCI communities to understand the mobile app research needs of these communities, (2) conduct interviews to understand the barriers researchers face and how a specific community infrastructure can mitigate these barriers, (3) host workshops to facilitate the exchange of best practices used for mining data and building analysis tools to guide the development of the infrastructure, (4) conduct a working group to explore the design of the infrastructure with existing researchers, researchers new to the topic, and educators of the topic, and (5) conduct a summative survey to assess the proposed infrastructure’s ability to support mobile app research.

The improved tools and techniques proposed by this project will better support app developers, enabling them to write higher quality applications, potentially impacting billions of app users. This project will also explore the potential for using the envisioned infrastructure to teach students how to effectively write mobile app software. Finally, as part of the proposed planning activities, barriers and challenges related to research on mobile app development will be uncovered that will inform new types of classroom pedagogy and new tools that will benefit novice researchers.

The long-term goal of this project is the creation of a sustainable open-source community centered around the proposed research infrastructure. The community will be fostered by the development of clear contribution guidelines, proper attribution of researcher contributions, and the distribution of researcher contributions to the larger academic community.

During the planning period, we will maintain a website that contains details related to the survey, workshop, working group, and summative report outlining the proposed design of the research infrastructure. The website can be found at the following link: www.sagelab.io/modal

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.