Sylvain Lecomte

Matias Martinez, Sylvain Lecomte

During last years development frameworks have emerged to make easier the development and maintenance of cross-platform mobile applications. Xamarin framework is one of them: it takes as input an app written in C# and produces native code for Android, iOS and Windows Mobile platforms. When using Xamarin, developers can meet errors, identified with codes, thrown by the framework.Unfortunately, the Xamarin official documentation does not provide a complete description, solution or workaround for all those codes.In this paper, we analyze two sites of questions and answers related to Xamarin for finding questions that mention those error codes. We found in both sites that there are questions written by developers asking about Xamarin errors, and the majority of them have at least one answer. Our intuition is this discovered information could be useful for giving support to Xamarin developers.

Matias Martinez, Sylvain Lecomte

Android and iSO are the two mobile platforms present in almost all smartphones build during last years. Developing an application that targets both platforms is a challenge. A traditional way is to build two different apps, one in Java for Android, the other in Objective-C for iOS. Xamarin is a framework for developing Android and iOS apps which allows developers to share most of the application code across multiple implementations of the app, each for a specific platform. In this paper, we present XamForumDB, a database that stores discussions, questions and answers extracted from the Xamarin forum. We envision research community could use it for studying, for instance, the problematic of developing such kind of applications.

Matias Martinez, Sylvain Lecomte

During last ten years, the number of smartphones and mobile applications has been constantly growing. Android, iOS and Windows Mobile are three mobile platforms that cover almost all smartphones in the world in 2017. Developing a mobile app involves first to choose the platforms the app will run, and then to develop specific solutions (i.e., native apps) for each chosen platform using platform-related toolkits such as AndroidSDK. Across-platform mobile application is an app that runs on two or more mobile platforms. Several frameworks have been proposed to simplify the development of cross-platform mobile applications and to reduce development and maintenance costs.They are called cross-platform mobile app development frameworks.However, to our knowledge, the life-cycle and the quality of cross-platforms mobile applications built using those frameworks have not been studied in depth. Our main goal is to first study the processes of development and maintenance of mobile applications built using cross-platform mobile app development frameworks, focusing particularly on the bug-fixing activity. Then, we aim at defining tools for automated repairing bugs from cross-platform mobile applications.