Self-Healing for Mobile Applications

The reliability and security of a software application are two of the most important software quality characteristics because they describe the ability of the software to run without failures and to protect user data. Mobile applications concur with desktop applications in terms of rich interfaces and functionalities and are becoming one the most used type of software applications. Based on the “anytime, anywhere” paradigm, mobile applications must provide special measures to avoid failures and to preserve a high level of reliability and security because mobile operating systems provide limited or none access to administrative or system tools that will allow a user with an IT background to access temporary or persistent data. A high level of software reliability is directly influenced by a low level of failures. We there-fore describe self-healing as a required quality characteristic for mobile applications and we propose a metric for measuring it. This approach is included in the general context of mobile applications quality and the papers describes types of mobile applications, their development cycle and features that are particular to mobile applications quality.