Mobile App Development and Management: Results from a Qualitative Investigation

Abstract

We conducted a qualitative study to investigate the main aspects related to the development and management of applications (or apps) for smart and mobile devices. Is investigation is composed of two main steps and its context is the so ware industry. In the rst step, we interviewed so ware managers with experience in the context of app development and management. Is part of our study can be intended as explorative because we used its outcomes to plan and execute the second step of our study, namely a survey with so ware professionals. From this survey, we obtained a number of ndings that we can summarize as follows: (i) app development is mostly done by junior developers, (ii) agile methodologies and cross-platform development frameworks are largely adopted even if there are no approaches and frameworks considered the best, (iii) support for testing is considered inadequate, (iv) fragmentation of so ware and hardware is perceived an important concern, and (v) app development is considered di erent from the development of web/desktop applications. Based on our ndings, we highlight areas that require more a ention from the research and the industry.