We present Samoa, a visual web-based software analytics platform for mobile applications. It mines software repositories of apps and uses a set of visualization techniques to present the mined data. We describe Samoa, detail the analyses it supports, and describe a methodology to understand apps from a structural and historical perspective.

1. A Visual Software Analytics Platform
for Mobile Applications
MOA AS
Roberto Minelli and Michele Lanza
REVEAL @ Faculty of Informatics – University of Lugano, Switzerland

2. Software
Analytics
Mobile
Applications
for

3. Software
Analytics
Mobile
Applications
for
Explore and analyze
the data to obtain
insightful information
about software systems,
users, and software
development process.

4. Software
Analytics
Explore and analyze
the data to obtain
insightful information
about software systems,
users, and software
development process.
Mobile
Applications
Software systems
aimed at smartphones,
tablet PCs, and other
handheld devices
for

5. The world of apps is
heterogeneous
Programming
Languages
AppStores

7. $4.5 billions
in 2009
$17.5 billionsin 2012
$25 billionsin 2015

8. Software systems
aimed at smartphones,
tablet PCs, and other
handheld devices
Mobile
Applications
Apps evolve
Maintenance
is crucial

9. Existing approaches were devised
before apps existed

10. oftware nalytics
for bile pplicationsMO
A
A
S
R. Minelli and M. Lanza
“Soware Analytics for Mobile Applications
Insights & Lessons Learned” CSMR 2013

11. MOA AS
http://samoa.inf.usi.ch
DEMO

12. Delta with largest snapshot in history
Number of
external calls
Number of
internal calls
The whole app (in terms of LOC)
The CORELOC Other LOC
Activity Main Activity
Default
Main Activity
Service
Phantom
Element
Core Circle Colors
Call Ring Colors
Android calls Java calls
JavaX calls Apache calls
Unclassified
calls
All other calls
The White Ring
The App Circle
The Core Circle
The Call Ring
The History Circle

13. Insights &
Lessons Learned

14. Violating guidelines
“[...] an application usually consists of multiple
activities that are loosely bound to each other.
Typically, one activity in an application is specified
as the "main" activity, which is presented to the user
when launching the application for the first time”.
In case of multiple main activities, developers have
to specify in the manifest a default Activity.

15. Core Circle Colors
Activity
Main Activity
Service
Phantom element
Default Main Activity
Violating guidelines

16. Use of third-party APIs
Java project
Source
code

17. Use of third-party APIs
Java project
Source
code

18. Use of third-party APIs
Java project
Source
code

19. ...
- 2.3
kLOC
+ 7 kLOC
Use of third-party APIs

20. Software
Analytics
Mobile
Applications
for
Software systems
aimed at smartphones,
tablet PCs, and other
handheld devices
Mobile
Applications
Maintenance
is crucial
Apps evolve
Insights &
Lessons Learned
R. Minelli and M. Lanza
“Soware Analytics for Mobile Applications –
Insights & Lessons Learned” CSMR 2013
MOA AS
http://samoa.inf.usi.ch

21. FRONT-ENDBACK-END
SVN
SVN
SVN
SVN
Data acquisition
Java SVN
crawler
Source code model extraction
MSE generatorAST generator
MSE parserAST parser
Metrics extraction
AST-based
metrics
MSE-based
metrics
JSON
Files
SAMOA
d3.jsJSON retrieval
HTML/CSS
JavaScript/
jQuery/PHP
Internet