Evaluating the Understandability of Android Applications

Abstract

Understandability is one of the major quality attributes used to measure the understandability of object oriented software and Android applications based on certain metrics. It is very important in most software development life cycles because misunderstanding any of the steps of the software development life cycle will lead to a poor-quality product. Mobile applications, like any software, need to be maintained and evolved over time, so understanding them is essential to their maintainability, reliability, quality and reusability. In this research, the authors discuss the importance of understandability in Android applications and determine the most influential metrics by using Metrics Reloaded tool to measure the metrics values. Then, based on these values, they develop a formula to measure the understandability for Android applications. The results show that the understandability of Android application can be measured by the formula developed based on object oriented and Android metrics.