Detection and Correction of Android-specific Code Smells and Energy Bugs: An Android Lint Extension

Context: While Android applications suffer from code smells and energy drain issues there is still a lack of tools that help developers improve energy consumption and maintainability of Android applications. Objective: Our research aims to provide tool support to Android developers helping them to create greener and more maintainable applications by eliminating Android-specific code smells/energy bugs. The proposed tool support integrates routine code smell detection with energy bug detection so that developers can do both at the same time. Method: We extend ‘Android Lint’ (AL) with custom rules to detect and correct 12 code smells (nine are new and three are improved) and three energy bugs (two are new and one is improved). In addition, for the improved and newly introduced code smells, we compared the performance of our tool with the open version of the ’PAPRIKA’ tool. Result: We evaluated our tool on nine open-source Android applications. Our tool detects the specified code smells and energy bugs with an average precision, average recall and F1 score of 0.93, 0.96, and 0.94, respectively. It accurately corrects 84% of selected code smells and energy bugs. The performance of the new and improved code smell detection is better than that achieved by ‘PAPRIKA’. Conclusion: Our tool is a useful extension to the existing ‘AL’ tool with better performance than ‘PAPRIKA’.