Browsing by Author "Khomh, Foutse"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Code Authorship and Fault-proneness of Open-Source Android Applications : An Empirical Study
    (International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering, 2017) Businge, John; Kawuma, Simon; Bainomugisha, Engineer; Khomh, Foutse; Nabaasa, Evarist
    In recent years, many research studies have shown how human factors play a significant role in the quality of software components. Code authorship metrics have been introduced to establish a chain of responsibility and simplify management when assigning tasks in large and distributed software development teams. Researchers have investigated the relationship between code authorship metrics and fault occurrences in software systems. However, we have observed that these studies have only been carried on large software systems having hundreds to thousands of contributors. In our preliminary investigations on Android applications that are considered to be relatively small, we observed that applications systems are not totally owned by a single developer (as one could expect) and that cases of no clear authorship also exist like in large systems. To this end, we do believe that the Android applications could face the same challenges faced by large software systems and could also benefit from such studies. Goal: We investigate the extent to which the findings obtained on large software systems applies to Android applications. Approach: Building on the designs of previous studies, we analyze 278 Android applications carefully selected from GitHub. We extract code authorship metrics from the applications and examine the relationship between code authorship metrics and faults using statistical modeling. Results: Our analyses confirm most of the previous findings, i.e., Android applications with higher levels of code authorship among contributors experience fewer faults.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Studying Android App Popularity by Cross-Linking GitHub and Google Play Store
    (IEEE, 2019) Businge, John; Openja, Moses; Kavalery, David; Bainomugisha, Engineer; Khomh, Foutse; Filkov, Vladimir
    The incredible success of the mobile App economy has been attracting software developers hoping for new or repeated success. Surviving in the fierce competitive App market involves in part planning ahead of time for the success of the App on the marketplace. Prior research has shown that App success can be viewed through its proxy–popularity. An important question, then, is what factors differentiates popular from unpopular Apps? GitHub, a software project forge, and Google Play store, an app market, are both crowdsourced, and provide some publicly available data that can be used to crosslink source code and app download popularity. In this study, we examined how technical and social features of Open Source Software Apps, mined from two crowdsourced websites, relate to App popularity. We observed that both the technical and the social factors play significant roles in explaining App popularity. However, the combined factors have a low effect size in explaining App popularity, as measured by average user rating on Google Play. Interestingly on GitHub, we found that social factors have a higher power in explaining the popularity compared to all the technical factors we investigated.