Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development
This addresses program comprehension problems for mobile app developers, but is incremental as it primarily reviews existing challenges and suggests future directions.
The paper identifies language dichotomies as a key challenge in mobile app development, where developers struggle with different program representations, and proposes a research roadmap to address these program comprehension issues.
Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we provide a roadmap of directions for future work.