A Developer-Centric Study Exploring Mobile Application Security Practices and Challenges

This is the dataset for the paper: A Developer-Centric Study Exploring Mobile Application Security Practices and Challenges

This paper was accepted for publication at the International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2024) - Industry Track

Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09032

Artifacts

The table below describes the artifacts associated with this study.

File
Purpose

SurveyResponse.csv
The results of the online survey. This file contains only responses from participants who completed all required survey questions.

SurveyQuestions.pdf & SurveyQuestions.tex
These files contain the survey questions in the form they were presented to participants. They are in PDF and LaTeX format.

ParticipantLocation.xlsx           
This file shows the location (based on Qualtircs metadata) of participants who responded to the survey.

IRB_Approval.pdf
This is the IRB approval document.

freetext-responses-categorized.xlsx
This file is related to survey questions #20, #22, and #23. It is a manual categorization of free-text responses by the authors.  

likert-figures\*.pdf
The files in this directory are the Likert figures used in the paper.

multichoice-questions\*.csv
The files in this directory show the frequency of occurrence for the answer options associated with single-choice and multi-choice questions.

code\
Python code to generate the Likert charts and the CSV files that show the frequency of occurrence for the answer options.

LICENSE.txt
Open-source license compliant with OSI.

Code

The code is written in Python. Below is a description of the files:

requirements.txt - Required packages

MultiChoiceAnalysis.py - This file contains the logic to analyze the multichoice questions to generate the frequency of occurrence of the answer options. The CSV files are created in the parent directory

main-mobileSecurity.py - This file reads SurveyResponse.csv (in the parent directory) and has the code to generate the likert charts and calls MultiChoiceAnalysis.py. The Likert charts are created in the parent directory.

Perform the below steps to execute the code:

 Create a Python virtual environment:

    python -m venv venv

Activate the virtual environment:

    venv\Scripts\activate

Install packages

    pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the Python code:

    python main-mobileSecurity.py

Below are details about the code execution output:

The CSV and PDF files will be created in the parent directory.

The Likert charts (i.e., PDF files) are created in a directory called "likert-figures"

The CSV files are created in a directory called "multichoice-questions"

Elements from the CSV files are part of the write-up in the Results section of the manuscript. The numeric digits that are part of the file name correspond to the survey question.

The data present in Tables 2 to 5 in the manuscript is obtained from the CSV files generated by the Python code. Specifically:

Table 2 - \multichoice-questions\survey-11-frequency_single_choice.csv

Table 3 - \multichoice-questions\survey-12-frequency_single_choice.csv

Table 4 - \multichoice-questions\survey-13-frequency_single_choice.csv

Table 5 - \multichoice-questions\survey-14-frequency_single_choice.csv and \multichoice-questions\survey-15-frequency_single_choice.csv

Note: We include these output files in the artifacts package by default. The user can delete these directories and run the code to regenerate the files.