Software logs are of great value in both industrial and open-source projects. Mobile analytics logging enables developers to collect logs remotely from their apps running on end user devices at the cost of recording and transmitting logs across the Internet to a centralised infrastructure. This paper makes a first step in characterising logging practices with a widely adopted mobile analytics logging library, namely Firebase Analytics. We provide an empirical evaluation of the use of Firebase Analytics in 57 open-source Android applications by studying the evolution of code-bases to understand: a) the needs-in-common that push practitioners to adopt logging practices on mobile devices, and b) the differences in the ways developers use local and remote logging. Our results indicate mobile analytics logs are less pervasive and less maintained than traditional logging code. Based on our analysis, we believe logging using mobile analytics is more user centered compared to traditional logging, where the latter is mainly used to record information for debugging purposes.
翻译:移动分析记录使开发者能够从在终端用户设备上运行的应用程序中远程收集日志,而成本是记录和通过互联网将日志传送到集中化的基础设施。本文件迈出了第一步,用广泛采用的移动分析伐木图书馆(即Firebase Analytics)来描述伐木做法。我们通过研究代码基的演变,对57个开放源码和机器人应用中使用Firebase分析工具的情况进行了经验性评估,以了解:a) 推动从业人员采用移动设备伐木做法的常见需要,b) 开发者使用本地和远程伐木方式的不同。我们的结果表明,移动分析日志比传统的伐木代码不那么普遍,维护较少。根据我们的分析,我们认为,使用移动分析工具的伐木比传统伐木更加以用户为中心,后者主要用于记录用于调试目的的信息。