Thesis of Geoffrey Hecht

Detection and analysis of impact of code smells in mobile applications

Mobile applications are becoming complex software systems that must be developed quickly and evolve continuously to fit new user requirements and execution contexts. However, addressing these constraints may result in poor low-level design choices, known as code smells. The presence of code smells within software systems may incidentally degrade their quality and performance, and hinder their maintenance and evolution. Thus, it is important to know this smells but also to detect and correct them. While code smells are well-known in object-oriented applications, their study in mobile applications is still in their infancy. Moreover there is a lack of tools to detect and correct them. That is why we present a classification of 17 code smells that may appear in Android applications, as well as a tool to detect and correct code smells on Android. We apply and validate our approach on large amounts of applications (over 3000) in two studies evaluating the presence and evolution of the number of code smells in popular applications. In addition, we also present two approaches to assess the impact of the correction of code smells on performance and energy consumption. These approaches have allowed us to observe that the correction of code smells is beneficial in most cases.

Jury

Directeurs de thèse : Romain Rouvoy (Lille) , Naouel Moha (UQAM) Rapporteurs : Bram Adams, Jean-Rémy Falleri Examinateurs : Sébastien Gambs, Pierre-Étienne Moreau

Thesis of the team Spirals defended on 30/11/2016