Since 2008, the Android ecosystem has been tremendously popular with consumers, developers, and manufacturers due to the open nature of the operating system and its compatibility and availability on a range of devices. This, however, comes at a cost. The variety of available devices and speed of evolution of the Android system itself adds layers of fragmentation to the ecosystem around which developers must navigate. Yet this phenomenon is not unique to the Android ecosystem, impacting desktop applications like Apache Tomcat and Google Chrome as well. As fragmentation of a system grows, so does the burden on developers to produce software than can execute on a wide variety of potential device, environment, and system combinations, while the reality prevents developers from anticipating every possible scenarios. This study provides the first empirical study characterizing portability bugs in both desktop and Android applications. Specifically, we examined 228 randomly selected bugs from 18 desktop and Android applications for the common root causes, manifestation patterns, and fix strategies used to combat portability bugs. Our study reveals several commonalities among the bugs and platforms, which include: (1) 92.14% of all bugs examined are caused by an interaction with a single dependency, (2) 53.13% of all bugs examined are caused by an interaction with the system, and (3) 33.19% of all bugs examined are fixed by adding a direct or indirect check against the dependency causing the bug. These results provide guidance for techniques and strategies to help developers and researchers identify and fix portability bugs. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Computer Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. / Summer Semester 2018. / July 20, 2018. / characteristic study, portability bugs / Includes bibliographical references. / Adrian Nistor, Professor Directing Thesis; Sonia Haiduc, Committee Member; David Whalley, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_650270 |
| Contributors | Clow, Jonathan Alexander (author), Nistor, Adrian (professor directing thesis), Haiduc, Sonia (committee member), Whalley, David B. (committee member), Florida State University (degree granting institution), College of Arts and Sciences (degree granting college), Department of Computer Science (degree granting departmentdgg) |
| Publisher | Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text, master thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource (57 pages), computer, application/pdf |
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