User Interface Matters: Analysing the Complexity of Mobile Applications from a Visual Perspective

Abstract

Product-centric techniques to analyze mobile applications leverage traditional source code analysis, size, market success, complexity, and others. Many of these techniques converge in the strategy of evaluating metrics taken from the source code that delivers the functionality of the software product. However, when following the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, mobile applications are typically constructed by a compound of at least two programming languages, one to deliver the functionality and the other to describe the visual aspects. The latter is commonly left out from source code analysis, even though critical parts of the application are present in the graphic User Interface (UI). In this paper, we identify an opportunity to strengthen the product-centric mobile app analysis by incorporating UI metrics. This approach aims to enhance the expressiveness of source code metrics and deliver a more comprehensive analysis of the complexity, maintainability, and effort estimation of a mobile app. To introduce the concept, we present a case study realized using a block-based programming language to create mobile apps, in which we describe and calculate functional and UI metrics, discover commonalities and differences, discuss traits, and open tracks for further research.