Two Datasets of Questions and Answers for Studying the Development of Cross-Platform Mobile Applications using Xamarin Framework

Abstract

A cross-platform mobile application is an application that runs on multiple mobile platforms (Android, iOS). Several frameworks have been proposed to simplify the development of cross-platform mobile applications and, therefore, to reduce development and maintenance costs. Between them, cross-compiler mobile development frameworks, such as Xamarin from Microsoft, transform the application's code written in intermediate (aka non-native) language to native code for each target platform (Android, iOS). However, to our best knowledge, there is not much research about the advantages and disadvantages of the use of those frameworks during the development and maintenance phases of mobile applications. The objective of this paper is to present two datasets of questions and answers (Q & A) related to the development of mobile applications using Xamarin. Our datasets have 85,908 questions mined from the Xamarin Forum and 44,434 from Stack Overflow. To show their usefulness, we present two experiments. First, we replicate a study for discovering the main discussion topics of Xamarin development present in the two datasets using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), and we compare them with topics previously reported about mobile development. Between the main topics discovered from those questions, we found that some of them are exclusively related to Xamarin and Microsoft technologies such as the design pattern 'MVVM'. Secondly, we aim at improving the official Xamarin documentation, which does not provide a complete description of the error codes that the Xamarin platform throws during development. We use our datasets of Q & A for complementing the error codes with information mined from accepted answers. We could complement the documentation of 23,9% of the error codes.