research-article

Static analysis for independent app developers

Authors:

Lucas Brutschy,

Pietro Ferrara,

Peter MüllerAuthors Info & Claims

OOPSLA '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages & Applications

Pages 847 - 860

https://doi.org/10.1145/2660193.2660219

Published: 15 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Mobile app markets have lowered the barrier to market entry for software producers. As a consequence, an increasing number of independent app developers offer their products, and recent platforms such as the MIT App Inventor and Microsoft's TouchDevelop enable even lay programmers to develop apps and distribute them in app markets.

A major challenge in this distribution model is to ensure the quality of apps. Besides the usual sources of software errors, mobile apps are susceptible to errors caused by the non-determinism of an event-based execution model, a volatile environment, diverse hardware, and others. Many of these errors are difficult to detect during testing, especially for independent app developers, who are not supported by test teams and elaborate test infrastructures.

To address this problem, we propose a static program analysis that captures the specifics of mobile apps and is efficient enough to provide feedback during the development process. Experiments involving 51,456 published TouchDevelop scripts show that our analysis analyzes 98% of the scripts in under a minute, and five seconds on average. Manual inspection of the analysis results for a selection of all scripts shows that most of the alarms are real errors.

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Cited By

Brutschy LDimitrov DMüller PVechev M(2018)Static serializability analysis for causal consistencyACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3296979.319241553:4(90-104)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3296979.3192415
Brutschy LDimitrov DMüller PVechev MFoster JGrossman D(2018)Static serializability analysis for causal consistencyProceedings of the 39th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3192366.3192415(90-104)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3192366.3192415
Ball TBurckhardt Sde Halleux JMoskal MProtzenko JTillmann NAbadi ADig DDubinsky Y(2015)Beyond open sourceProceedings of the Second ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems10.5555/2825041.2825057(83-93)Online publication date: 16-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2825041.2825057
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Static analysis for independent app developers

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cover image ACM Conferences

OOPSLA '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages & Applications

October 2014

946 pages

ISBN:9781450325851

DOI:10.1145/2660193

General Chair:
Andrew Black
Portland State University, USA
,
Program Chair:
Todd Millstein
University of California, Los Angeles, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 49, Issue 10
OOPSLA '14
October 2014
907 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/2714064
Editor:
Andy Gill
University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 15 October 2014

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SPLASH '14

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SPLASH '14: Conference on Systems, Programming, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 20 - 24, 2014

Oregon, Portland, USA

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OOPSLA '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 52 of 186 submissions, 28%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,244 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

Brutschy LDimitrov DMüller PVechev M(2018)Static serializability analysis for causal consistencyACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3296979.319241553:4(90-104)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3296979.3192415
Brutschy LDimitrov DMüller PVechev MFoster JGrossman D(2018)Static serializability analysis for causal consistencyProceedings of the 39th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3192366.3192415(90-104)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3192366.3192415
Ball TBurckhardt Sde Halleux JMoskal MProtzenko JTillmann NAbadi ADig DDubinsky Y(2015)Beyond open sourceProceedings of the Second ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems10.5555/2825041.2825057(83-93)Online publication date: 16-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2825041.2825057
Singh GPüschel MVechev M(2015)Making numerical program analysis fastACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2813885.273800050:6(303-313)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2813885.2738000
Singh GPüschel MVechev MGrove DBlackburn S(2015)Making numerical program analysis fastProceedings of the 36th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/2737924.2738000(303-313)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2737924.2738000
Ball TBurckhardt Sde Halleux JMoskal MProtzenko JTillmann N(2015)Beyond Open Source: The Touch Develop Cloud-Based Integrated Development Environment2015 2nd ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems10.1109/MobileSoft.2015.20(83-93)Online publication date: May-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/MobileSoft.2015.20
Brutschy LFerrara PMüller PAbadi ADig DTilevich E(2014)TouchGuruProceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Mobile Development Lifecycle10.1145/2688412.2688421(33-34)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2688412.2688421
Autili MMalavolta IPerucci AScoccia GVerdecchia R(2021)Software engineering techniques for statically analyzing mobile apps: research trends, characteristics, and potential for industrial adoptionJournal of Internet Services and Applications10.1186/s13174-021-00134-x12:1Online publication date: 23-Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13174-021-00134-x
Assal HHolzmann CMayrhofer RHäkkilä JRukzio ERoland M(2015)Collaborative security code reviewProceedings of the 14th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia10.1145/2836041.2841224(439-444)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2836041.2841224

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