  Code changes are performed differently in the mobile and non-mobile
platforms. Prior work has investigated the differences in specific platforms.
However, we still lack a deeper understanding of how code changes evolve across
different software platforms. In this paper, we present a study aiming at
investigating the frequency of changes and how source code, build and test
changes co-evolve in mobile and non-mobile platforms. We developed regression
models to explain which factors influence the frequency of changes and applied
the Apriori algorithm to find types of changes that frequently co-occur. Our
findings show that non-mobile repositories have a higher number of commits per
month and our regression models suggest that being mobile significantly impacts
on the number of commits in a negative direction when controlling for confound
factors, such as code size. We also found that developers do not usually change
source code files together with build or test files. We argue that our results
can provide valuable information for developers on how changes are performed in
different platforms so that practices adopted in successful software systems
can be followed.

Software Engineering