Guiding Quality Assurance for Mobile Applications with FIT4Apps — A Two-Step Evaluation

Abstract

The quality of mobile applications is one essential factor for their success because users often immediately discard applications with insufficient quality. In prior contributions, we presented FIT4Apps, a quality assurance method for mobile applications, which focuses inspections and tests on the development of mobile applications. We performed a two-step empirical evaluation of this method: a controlled experiment and a case study, which was performed as a post-mortem analysis. The empirical evaluation showed the applicability of FIT4Apps and demonstrated that it finds, respectively prevents, at least 75% more mobile-specific failures during development compared to state-of-the-practice approaches. This comprises failures revealed by testing or prevented by revealed requirements defects and leads to at least 85% less mobile-specific failures after the release of the mobile application. In our setting, the effort for applying FIT4Apps is less than 1% of the overall development effort for an iteration and may even save effort considering the benefits of earlier findings.