"Mobile App Development and Management: Results from a Qualitative Investigation" by Rita Francese, Carmine Gravino, Michele Risi, Giuseppe Scanniello and Genoveffa Tortora MobileSoft'17, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2017.

1. Rita Francese1
, Carmine Gravino1
, Michele Risi 1
Giuseppe Scanniello2
and Genoveffa Tortora1
University of Salerno1
, University of Basilicata2
Mobile App Development and Management:
Results from a Qualitative Investigation
4th
IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems
Buenos Aires, May 22-23, 2017 - Argentina

2. Context
 Applications (apps) for smart devices are an
increasingly important part of our daily life…
 Researchers are studying different aspects
related to apps
 mining app-store repository
 testing
 privacy
 energy consumption
 …

3. Context
 Although the increasing interest on the
development of mobile devices…
 The software engineering research has made
little effort to deal with the development and
management of mobile apps

4. Goal
 Conduct a qualitative study to investigate
the main aspects related to the development
and management of apps for smart and
mobile devices
 Conduct an empirical investigation with
professionals in the context of software
industry

5. Qualitative study
 The study is qualitative and it is composed by
two main steps:
 First step: structured interviews with IT managers
 Second step: industrial survey

6. Interviews: 4 IT managers
 The interview was audio recorded via Skype
 Interview consists of four parts:
1. Demographic information
2. Free discussion about development and
management of apps
3. Interviewee selects 2-3 software engineering topics
4. Interviewer selects 2-3 topics not previously covered
Position Sector Kind OSs
IT Manager IT & Telecommunication National
BlackBerry, Android
iOS, Windows Mobile
Software Architect
Project Manager
Communication, Enterprise
Solution, Marketing
International
iOS, Android
Windows Mobile
Project Manager IT & Telecommunication International iOS, Android
Executive
Project Manager
Software House National
Windows Mobile
Android

7. Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK):
1. Software Requirement
2. Software Design
3. Software Testing
4. Software Maintenance
5. Software Configuration Management
6. Software Engineering Process
7. Project Management
8. Software Engineering Economics

8. Interview outcomes
 Apps vs. Web/Desktop Applications:
Type Enterprise Consumer
Usability less important important
Migration web + cross-platform native
Development less risky
similar to desktop
applications
GUI - pleasant

9. Interview outcomes
 Software Requirements:
 Usability is relevant and companies deal with it by
properly designing GUI in the requirements
engineering process by exploiting screen mock-ups
 Security seems relevant
 Software Design:
 The developer designs the GUI for all the kinds of
devices and then implements native applications to
avoid issues with the OS versions

10. Interview outcomes
 Software Testing:
 There is a lack of tools to automate testing and
to perform regression testing on apps running on
different platforms (i.e., fragmentation problem)
 It is very important to test GUI
 Software Maintenance:
 Maintenance is relevant for enterprise apps
 Maintenance can be seen as an activity to migrate
a web application towards a mobile device

11. Interview outcomes
 Software Configuration Management:
 Companies opt for traditional SCM tools
 Software Engineering Process:
 Agile methods and prototyping are often adopted
 Project Management:
 Training on technologies to develop mobile app is a key
factor
 Development team has a well-defined technical-
organizational structure and tight deadlines to deploy new
releases
 Software Engineering Economics:
 The customer believes that app development is cheap,
while it is not

12. Survey
 We mostly used outcomes from interviews,
past survey, our experience to form our survey
 140 candidate questions
 Remove questions:
 ambiguous, possibly difficult for respondents to
accurately self-assess, or similar to one another
 122 final questions
 We made the survey available on the web…

13. Survey

14. Survey participants
 We invited 510 professionals (worldwide) with
competencies and skills in app development and
management:
 25 from our industrial-contact networks
 485 from LinkedIn
 2 years of mobile development e/o management
experience in the last 10 years
 82 (16%) filled in our survey and 3 declined

15. Survey participants

16. Organization & Project Management

17. Development and Management

18. Development and Management

19. Development and Management

20. Testing

21. User’s experience

22. Mainteinance
 We observed that 39 respondents never
performed maintenance
 44 respondents declared that maintenance
activities are not managed by an agreement
with the customer

23. Threats to validity
 Internal validity
 To reduce difficulty to comprehend we
provided each section of our survey with a
glossary of terms
 External validity
 Few interviewed IT experts limited
generalizability of interviews
 The larger number of participants in the
survey afforded much better generalizability
 Survey length could have affected responses

24. Conclusion
 From the survey, we obtained a number of
findings:
1. app development is done by junior developers
2. agile methodologies and cross-platform
developments are largely adopted
3. support for testing is not considered adequate
4. fragmentation of software and hardware is an
important issue
5. app development is considered different from the
development of web/desktop applications

25. Implications
1. Several strands of research could have a
significant impact on app development and
management:
 The first is the study of multi-platform solutions
for development and testing of hybrid and native
apps
 The development of native apps is preferred due
to the number of limitations related to the use
of hybrid multi-platform solutions

26. Implications
2. Agile methodologies are adopted, there is not
an approach/technology to develop apps
across platforms considered the best
3. Maintenance is not perceived very important
from the customers
4. UX is a hot topic and dealing with it presents a
number of challenges related to the variety of
possibilities mobile devices

27. Michele Risi, PhD, Assistant Professor
Dipartimento di Informatica (DI)
University of Salerno
email: mrisi@unisa.it
home page: http://docenti.unisa.it/michele.risi
Survey and responses: http://www2.unibas.it/gscanniello/AppsSurvey