Luca Ardito

Giacomo Garaccione, Riccardo Coppola, Luca Ardito

Unified Modeling Language (UML) Use Case and Class Diagrams are fundamental modeling notations in Software Engineering (SE) education due to their importance for requirements and model-based engineering, yet their relevance is underestimated by students, who tend to dismiss the topic as secondary. Gamification has been adopted to make modeling education more appealing, but existing tools focus almost exclusively on class diagrams, leaving support for use cases and other notations unexplored. In 2025, we designed UMLegend, a gamified tool for class diagrams that offered dynamic feedback to help students learn correct modeling practices and multiple long-term mechanics to increase engagement, and performed a study with the tool. With this paper, we describe how we enhanced UMLegend following the results of the experiment so that it can support more modeling languages, with use case diagrams being added to the type of available exercises in the tool. The revised version has been refactored to have a modular architecture, to make it easier to add other software engineering topics and additional modeling notations. We also describe the potential impact we expect the new version to have, and outline a longitudinal study we intend to perform in 2026 where we will assess whether long-term UML gamification leads to improved student performance.

Riccardo Coppola, Luca Ardito, Marco Torchiano

Kotlin is a novel language that represents an alternative to Java, and has been recently adopted as a first-class programming language for Android applications. Kotlin is achieving a significant diffusion among developers, and several studies have highlighted various advantages of the language when compared to Java. The objective of this paper is to analyze a set of open-source Android apps, to evaluate their transition to the Kotlin programming language throughout their lifespan and understand whether the adoption of Kotlin has impacts on the success of Android apps. We mined all the projects from the F-Droid repository of Android open-source applications, and we found the corresponding projects on the official Google Play Store and on the GitHub platform. We defined a set of eight metrics to quantify the relevance of Kotlin code in the latest update and through all releases of an application. Then, we statistically analyzed the correlation between the presence of Kotlin code in a project and popularity metrics mined from the platforms where the apps were released. Of a set of 1232 projects that were updated after October 2017, near 20% adopted Kotlin and about 12% had more Kotlin code than Java; most of the projects that adopted Kotlin quickly transitioned from Java to the new language. The projects featuring Kotlin had on average higher popularity metrics; a statistically significant correlation has been found between the presence of Kotlin and the number of stars on the GitHub repository. The Kotlin language seems able to guarantee a seamless migration from Java for Android developers. With an inspection on a large set of open-source Android apps, we observed that the adoption of the Kotlin language is rapid (when compared to the average lifespan of an Android project) and seems to come at no cost in terms of popularity among the users and other developers.

Riccardo Coppola, Luca Ardito, Marco Torchiano

Context: Albeit different approaches exist for automated GUI testing of hybrid mobile applications, the practice appears to be not so commonly adopted by developers. A possible reason for such a low diffusion can be the fragility of the techniques, i.e. the frequent need for maintaining test cases when the GUI of the app is changed. Goal: In this paper, we perform an assessment of the maintenance needed by test cases for a hybrid mobile app, and the related fragility causes. Methods: We evaluated a small test suite with a Layout-based testing tool (Appium) and a Visual one (EyeAutomate) and observed the changes needed by tests during the co-evolution with the GUI of the app. Results: We found that 20% Layout-based test methods and 30% Visual test methods had to be modified at least once, and that each release induced fragilities in 3-4% of the test methods. Conclusion: Fragility of GUI tests can induce relevant maintenance efforts in test suites of large applications. Several principal causes for fragilities have been identified for the tested hybrid application, and guidelines for developers are deduced from them.