Mobile development companies aim to maximize the return on investments by making their mobile applications (Apps) available on different mobile platforms. Consequently, the same App is developed several times; each time the developer uses the programming languages and development tools of a specific platform. Therefore, there is a need to have cross-platform mobile applications development solutions that enable the developers to develop the App once and run it everywhere. The Integrated Cross-Platform Mobile Applications Development (ICPMD) solution is one of the attempts that enables the developers to use the most popular programming languages like Java for Android and C# for Windows Phone 8 (WP8). ICPMD is used to transform both the source code and user interface to another language to generate full Apps on the target platform. This paper extends ICPMD by proposing a new code conversion approach based on XSLT and Regular Expressions to ease the conversion process. In addition, it provides the assessment method to compare the ICPMD efficiency with competing approaches. Several Apps are converted from WP8 to Android and vice versa. The ICPMD evaluation results show reasonable improvement over commercial cross-platform mobile development tools (Titanium and Xamarin).

Software maintenance becomes an integral part of software life cycle and constitutes the most important fraction of the total cost of the software lifecycle. Around 50–80 percent of the total lifecycle cost is consumed by maintenance for evolving system [35]. Thus systems with poor maintainability are difficult to modify and require more cost to maintain. This difficulty arises from the impact on the system components where the new requirements/goals will be implemented [9]. These new goals will result in modification of existing components and creation of new components. In this paper, we present the foundations for a new Hybrid-Based Maintainability Impact Analysis (HBMIA) methodology for assessing the impact of the new goals to be selected for implementation on new and existing system components. HBMIA uses not only the system history but it also gets benefit from the experts' experience. HBMIA balances between the system historical data and experts' data based on the system maturity and expert's experience for system components. A case study is performed to demonstrate the added value of the proposed HBMIA.