论文标题
自动检测Android应用中API诱导的兼容性问题:比较分析(可复制性研究)
Automatically Detecting API-induced Compatibility Issues in Android Apps: A Comparative Analysis (Replicability Study)
论文作者
论文摘要
分裂是Android生态系统中的一个严重问题。这个问题主要是由系统本身的快速发展以及不同智能手机制造商独立维护的各种自定义引起的。许多努力试图通过方法在Android应用中自动查明兼容性问题来减轻其影响。不幸的是,在此阶段,是否实现了这个目标,现有的方法确实可以被复制并可靠地利用以查明野外的兼容性问题。因此,我们建议通过首先在本主题中进行文献综述来识别所有可用方法,以填补这一空白。在确定的九种方法中,我们尽最大努力根据其原始数据集复制它们。之后,我们迈出了进一步的一步,将这些方法与包含兼容性问题的现实世界应用程序与常见数据集进行了比较。实验结果表明,现有工具确实可以复制,但是它们的功能完全不同,这证明了所选工具报告的结果只有很小的重叠。这些证据表明,我们的社区应花费更多的努力来实现合理的兼容性问题。
Fragmentation is a serious problem in the Android ecosystem. This problem is mainly caused by the fast evolution of the system itself and the various customizations independently maintained by different smartphone manufacturers. Many efforts have attempted to mitigate its impact via approaches to automatically pinpoint compatibility issues in Android apps. Unfortunately, at this stage, it is still unknown if this objective has been fulfilled, and the existing approaches can indeed be replicated and reliably leveraged to pinpoint compatibility issues in the wild. We, therefore, propose to fill this gap by first conducting a literature review within this topic to identify all the available approaches. Among the nine identified approaches, we then try our best to reproduce them based on their original datasets. After that, we go one step further to empirically compare those approaches against common datasets with real-world apps containing compatibility issues. Experimental results show that existing tools can indeed be reproduced, but their capabilities are quite distinct, as confirmed by the fact that there is only a small overlap of the results reported by the selected tools. This evidence suggests that more efforts should be spent by our community to achieve sound compatibility issues detection.