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. This investigation is composed of two main steps and its context is the software industry. In the first step, we interviewed software managers with experience in the context of app development and management. This 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 software professionals. From this survey, we obtained a number of findings 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 software and hardware is perceived an important concern; and (v) app development is considered different from the development of web/desktop applications. Based on our findings, we highlight areas that require more attention from the research and the industry.