DevOps Mobile Application Development

The main objective of this research is to classify the activities developers perform in real projects and map them to the phases of the DevOps cycle.

We analyzed commit messages and changes made during the development of Android applications within a dataset of 7,441 Android repositories, with 1,983,967 total commits. First, we performed a qualitative manual analysis of 2,000 sampled revisions to identify the activities of Android mobile application developers and correlate them with DevOps practices. The obtained data were then used to train an ML algorithm and extend the classification to the whole dataset. In addition, metadata extracted from the repositories was used to refine the results.

Finally, we categorized mobile development activities based on DevOps practices to understand how those practices are applied and potential open directions for practitioners and researchers.