科研之友
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摘要
Now, mobile applications grow at an exponential speed and their evolution activities are very active, while there is little research on the evolution of mobile apps. To have a better understanding of the evolution of mobile apps and find similarities or patterns in their evolution process, we conduct an empirical study on long spans in the lifetime of 8 typical open-source mobile apps, which covers 348 official releases. First, we try to verify whether Lehman's laws still apply to mobile apps or not, extract a variety of metrics of the apps, and use statistical hypothesis testing to validate these laws. We find enough data that support a subset of Lehman's laws, while the rest do not. Second, we make some novel observations, eg, the growth of mobile apps is nonsmooth, and some versions of the apps have a great growth in their evolution. Enough data confirming that software instability increases great with the addition of third-party method invocations, and automatic build and manage tool based on contract is introduced into project as apps continue evolving.
