Smart contract, a term which was originally coined to refer to the automation of legal contracts in general, has recently seen much interest due to the advent of blockchain technology. Recently, the term is popularly used to refer to low-level code scripts running on a blockchain platform. Our study focuses exclusively on this subset of smart contracts. Such smart contracts have increasingly been gaining ground, finding numerous important applications (e.g., crowdfunding) in the real world. Despite the increasing popularity, smart contract development still remains somewhat a mystery to many developers largely due to its special design and applications. Are there any differences between smart contract development and traditional software development? What kind of challenges are faced by developers during smart contract development? Questions like these are important but have not been explored by researchers yet. In this paper, we performed an exploratory study to understand the current state and potential challenges developers are facing in developing smart contracts on blockchains, with a focus on Ethereum (the most popular public blockchain platform for smart contracts). Toward this end, we conducted this study in two phases. In the first phase, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 developers from GitHub and industry professionals who are working on smart contracts. In the second phase, we performed a survey on 232 practitioners to validate the findings from the interviews. Our interview and survey results revealed several major challenges developers are facing during smart contract development: (1) there is no effective way to guarantee the security of smart contract code; (2) existing tools for development are still very basic; (3) the programming languages and the virtual machines still have a number of limitations; (4) performance problems are hard to handle under resource constrained running environment; and (5) online resources (including advanced/updated documents and community support) are still limited. Our study suggests several directions that researchers and practitioners can work on to help improve developers’ experience on developing high-quality smart contracts.

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Smart Contract Development: Challenges and Opportunities

A systematic mapping study of mobile application testing techniques

Automated testing of Android apps is essential for app users, app developers, and market maintainer communities alike Given the widespread adoption of Android and the specificities of its development model, the literature has proposed various testing approaches for ensuring that not only functional requirements but also nonfunctional requirements are satisfied In this paper, we aim at providing a clear overview of the state-of-the-art works around the topic of Android app testing, in an attempt to highlight the main trends, pinpoint the main methodologies applied, and enumerate the challenges faced by the Android testing approaches as well as the directions where the community effort is still needed To this end, we conduct a systematic literature review during which we eventually identified 103 relevant research papers published in leading conferences and journals until 2016 Our thorough examination of the relevant literature has led to several findings and highlighted the challenges that Android testing researchers should strive to address in the future After that, we further propose a few concrete research directions where testing approaches are needed to solve recurrent issues in app updates, continuous increases of app sizes, as well as the Android ecosystem fragmentation

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Automated Testing of Android Apps: A Systematic Literature Review

There has been tremendous growth in the use of mobile devices over the last few years. This growth has fueled the development of millions of software applications for these mobile devices often called as 'apps'. Current estimates indicate that there are hundreds of thousands of mobile app developers. As a result, in recent years, there has been an increasing amount of software engineering research conducted on mobile apps to help such mobile app developers. In this paper, we discuss current and future research trends within the framework of the various stages in the software development life-cycle: requirements (including non-functional), design and development, testing, and maintenance. While there are several non-functional requirements, we focus on the topics of energy and security in our paper, since mobile apps are not necessarily built by large companies that can afford to get experts for solving these two topics. For the same reason we also discuss the monetizing aspects of a mobile app at the end of the paper. For each topic of interest, we first present the recent advances done in these stages and then we present the challenges present in current work, followed by the future opportunities and the risks present in pursuing such research.

Future Trends in Software Engineering Research for Mobile Apps

A relevant complexity factor in developing and testing mobile apps is given by their sensibility to changes in the context in which they run. As an example, apps running on a smartphone can be influenced by location changes, phone calls, device movements and many other typologies of context events. In this paper, we address the problem of testing a mobile app as an event-driven system by taking into account both context events and GUI events. We present approaches based on the definition of reusable event patterns for the manual and automatic generation of test cases for mobile app testing. One of the proposed testing techniques, based on a systematic and automatic exploration of the behaviour of an Android app, has been implemented and some preliminary case studies on real apps have been carried out in order to explore their effectiveness.

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Considering Context Events in Event-Based Testing of Mobile Applications

While mobile applications are becoming so extraordinarily adopted, it is still unclear if they deserve any specific testing approach for their verification and validation. This paper wants to investigate new research directions on mobile applications testing automation, by answering three research questions: (RQ1) are mobile applications (so) different from traditional ones, so to require different and specialized new testing techniques?, (RQ2) what are the new challenges and research directions on testing mobile applications?, and (RQ3) which is the role automation may play in testing mobile applications?. We answer those questions by analyzing the current state of the art in mobile applications development and testing, and by proposing our view on the topic.

Patrizio Esposito

Papers

Software testing of mobile applications: challenges and future research directions