Pathways for statically mining the Model-View-Controller software architecture on mobile applications

In the last few years, we have seen an increase in the number of mobile applications and their usage. The architectural pattern and correctness represent a major factor in the success of a mobile project and its lifecycle. Since architectural patterns can not be imposed on a codebase without an external validation system, we are proposing a novel technique for automatically analysing one of the most commonly used presentational architectural pattern Model-View-Controller (MVC). Our system analyses and detects architectural issues by leveraging information obtain from Software Development Kits (SDKs). For the evaluation of our proposal, we have focused on mobile codebases (private and open source), most specifically on the iOS platform. However, our findings can be extrapolated to other platforms which use SDKs for building their user interfaces (UI).