A Manual Categorization of Android App Development Issues on Stack Overflow

While many tutorials, code examples, and documentation about Android APIs exist, developers still face various problems with the implementation of Android Apps. Many of these issues are discussed on Q&A-sites, such as Stack Overflow. In this paper we present a manual categorization of 450 Android related posts of Stack Overflow concerning their question and problem types. The idea is to find dependencies between certain problems and question types to get better insights into issues of Android App development. The categorization is developed using card sorting with three experienced Android App developers. An initial approach to automate the classification of Stack Overflow posts using Lucene is also presented. The study highlights that the most common question types are 'How to?' and 'What is the problem?'. The problems that are discussed most often are related to 'User Interface' and 'Core Elements'. In particular, the problem category 'Layout' is often related to 'What is the problem?' and 'Frameworks' issues often come with 'Is it possible?' questions.

[1]  Bella Martin,et al.  Universal Methods of Design: 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas, and Design Effective Solutions , 2012 .

[2]  Gerardo Canfora,et al.  How changes affect software entropy: an empirical study , 2014, Empirical Software Engineering.

[3]  Gabriele Bavota,et al.  API change and fault proneness: a threat to the success of Android apps , 2013, ESEC/FSE 2013.

[4]  Bogdan Dit,et al.  An exploratory analysis of mobile development issues using stack overflow , 2013, 2013 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR).

[5]  Philippe Kruchten,et al.  Real Challenges in Mobile App Development , 2013, 2013 ACM / IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement.

[6]  Eleni Stroulia,et al.  Understanding Android Fragmentation with Topic Analysis of Vendor-Specific Bugs , 2012, 2012 19th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering.

[7]  Ahmed E. Hassan,et al.  What are developers talking about? An analysis of topics and trends in Stack Overflow , 2014, Empirical Software Engineering.

[8]  Christoph Treude,et al.  How do programmers ask and answer questions on the web?: NIER track , 2011, 2011 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

[9]  Cristina V. Lopes,et al.  Trendy bugs: Topic trends in the Android bug reports , 2012, 2012 9th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR).

[10]  Arie van Deursen,et al.  Communication in open source software development mailing lists , 2013, 2013 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR).