Helping Mobile Software Code Reviewers: A Study of Bug Repair and Refactoring Patterns

Abstract

Mobile Developers commonly spend a significant amount of time and effort on conducting code reviews on newly introduced and domain-specific practices, such as platform-specific feature addition, quality of service anti-pattern refactorings, and battery-related bug fixes. To address these problems, we conducted a large empirical study over the software change history of 318 open source projects and investigated platform-dependent code changes from open source projects. Our analysis focuses on what types of changes mobile application developers typically make and how they perceive, recall, and communicate changed and affected code. Our study required the development of an automated strategy to examine open source repositories and categorize platform-related refactoring edits, bug repairs, and API updates, mining 1,961,990 commit changes. Our findings call for the need to develop a new recommendation system aimed at efficiently identifying required changes such as bug fixes and refactorings during mobile application code reviews.