when i arrived, the zhou lab was looking to begin exploring mobile applications as an area of research. i worked with xinxin jin, a 3rd year phd student, to investigate open issues on the android platform. after sifting through issue trackers and error reports and discussing our findings with professor zhou, we began to focus on how applications are designed to respond to connectivity stress. at first we were looking at testing platforms and frameworks that allowed developers to easily, quickly, and thoroughly test applications in real-world situations including dropped or weak network connections. realizing how large the scope of this problem was, i ultimately took on a smaller segment of sampling current practices on applications developed by companies with both large and small resources, documenting what the actual behavior of various apps were compared to their expected or ideal behavior towards the goal of ultimately creating a standardized framework of a life-cycle response to network stress.
