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The impact of the code smells of the presentation layer on the diffuseness of aesthetic defects of Android apps

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Abstract

Recently, the number of Android apps has witnessed an ever-increase that is becoming a ubiquitous presence in our daily lives. These apps are evolving fast by offering new characteristics and functionalities. These ongoing improvements often affect app quality due to bad design practices and poor coding, known as Android code smells. In this context, the recent works highlighted the importance of the design quality of mobile application. To this end, many methods and tools are proposed to assess the quality of graphical user interface (GUI) and source code of Android apps, such as heuristic evaluation and field-testing, etc. In addition, the features and design of these Android apps may introduce bad design practices, that can highly decrease the quality and the performance of these Android applications. In this paper, we empirically study the diffuseness of GUI aesthetic defects and the code smells of the presentation layer of Android apps. Then, we investigate the impact of the appearance of code smells on the aesthetic of Android apps. To this end, we use two evaluation tools. The first one is called PLAIN which consists of detecting aesthetic defects by measuring a set of structural metrics of GUI. The second one is Android UI Detector which aims to identify the presentation layer code smells of Android apps. This analysis study is based on 8480 GUIs of 120 Android apps. The obtained results confirm that code smells of the presentation layer of Android apps have an impact on GUI aesthetic defects.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National School of Computer Sciences, Manouba, Tunisia

    Mabrouka Chouchane

  2. College of Computing and Informatics Saudi Electronic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Makram Soui

  3. Private Higher School of Engineering and Technology, Ariana, Tunisia

    Khaled Ghedira

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  1. Mabrouka Chouchane
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  2. Makram Soui
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  3. Khaled Ghedira
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Correspondence to Mabrouka Chouchane.

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Chouchane, M., Soui, M. & Ghedira, K. The impact of the code smells of the presentation layer on the diffuseness of aesthetic defects of Android apps. Autom Softw Eng 28, 20 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-021-00297-8

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