SBIR Phase II: Combining Program Analysis Breakthroughs and Big Data to Improve Mobile App Quality

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will result from greatly improving mobile app user experience, boosting developer productivity, and speeding up mobile innovations by automating the mundane and simplifying the complex in Android app testing. Apps are now everywhere. They innovate almost every industry. By making it easy to build high-quality apps, users enjoy better experience and developers enjoy better productivity, benefiting every industry and person that use apps. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project seeks to modernize the software development process by combining both program analysis research breakthroughs and big data technologies. Toward this vision, this project aims to build a unique product with innovative technologies to help developers automatically test Android apps. The product continuously tests apps across code changes to detect issues such as performance regressions, crashes, and memory leaks, as soon as problematic code is introduced. In contrast, existing tools often alert developers too late, after real users have been affected and many code changes have been merged, making it both stressful and difficult to find the problematic code. The proposed product gives actionable diagnosis by pinpointing what problematic code developers need to fix and explaining the why and how of the fix. It is thus much more intelligent and easy to use than existing tools.