Investigating the Adoption of Agile Practices in Mobile Application

Development

Alan Santos

, Josiane Kroll

, Afonso Sales

, Paulo Fernandes

and Daniel Wildt

Computer Science Department, Pontiﬁcal University Catholic of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil

WildTech, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil

Keywords:

Software Engineering, Mobile Application, Software Development, Agile Practices, Challenges, Beneﬁts.

Abstract:

The mobile application development market has been dramatically growing in the last few years as the com-

plexity of its applications and speed of software development process. These changes in the mobile develop-

ment market require a rethinking on the way the software development should be performed by teams. In order

to better understand how agile practices support mobile application development, we applied a questionnaire

to 20 undergraduate students. These students have been training in an iOS development course combined

with agile practices. Our study aims to identify challenges and to report the students experience on the adop-

tion of agile practices to develop mobile applications. Our ﬁndings reveal that agile practices help mobile

software development mainly in terms of project management and control and development speed. However,

aspects of user interface and user experience, different development platforms, and users expectations still

point challenges in developing mobile applications.

1 INTRODUCTION

Mobile application development is a new trend in the

software industry. It also plays an important role in

the economic development of a country as well as in

teaching and learning (Zhang, 2015). The combina-

tion of devices such as cameras, sensors, touch and

GPS with mobile platforms increase the possibilities

for developing new mobile applications (apps). Ad-

ditionally, devices have become more complex and

mission critical (Lewis et al., 2013) due to the sud-

den wave of mobile device use.

According to Wasserman (Wasserman, 2010),

mobile devices have been adopted in different ways

for desktop or laptop computers. Mobile applications

development can be similar to software engineering

for other embedded applications. However, mobile

applications development present some additional re-

quirements that are less commonly found if compared

to traditional software applications. The relevance

of mobile software products has reached a point in

which its devices have become one of the most pop-

ular platforms for the distribution and use of user-

oriented software (Corral, 2012). The development

speed in mobile software development has become a

key factor due to developers’ possibility of submitting

applications (apps) directly to the market. Thus, it is

necessary to identify agile practices to implement mo-

bile applications as well as to provide a good learning

experience.

In this paper, we investigate challenges in mobile

application development and the students’ experience

on the adoption of agile practices for developing mo-

bile applications. In order to achieve this goal, we

applied a questionnaire to 20 undergraduate students

who have been attending an iOS development course.

This course adopted agile practices to develop differ-

ent types of mobile applications. Our results describe

the participants’ perception on the use of agile prac-

tices, challenges, and perceived beneﬁts. The main

contribution of this paper is to provide a further dis-

cussion about the adoption of agile practices for mo-

bile application development.

The remainder of this paper is organized as fol-

lows: Section 2 introduces a brief background

about mobile application development while Sec-

tion 3 presents a background on agile software de-

velopment. In Section 4, we describe the research

methodology adopted in this study and, in Section 5,

we present the results. Section 6 discusses our re-

sults. Finally, we draw our conclusion an future work

in Section 7.

490

Santos, A., Kroll, J., Sales, A., Fernandes, P. and Wildt, D.

Investigating the Adoption of Agile Practices in Mobile Application Development.

In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2016) - Volume 1, pages 490-497

ISBN: 978-989-758-187-8

2 MOBILE APPLICATION

DEVELOPMENT

Since 2008, Apple and Google have opened their ap-

plication store for iOS and Android platforms, a point

where mobile apps started quickly evolve. Mobile ap-

plication development is a process in which applica-

tions are developed for small handheld devices, being

either pre-installed on devices during manufacture or

downloaded from application stores or other software

distribution platforms (Flora and Chande, 2013). Fol-

lowing the evolution of mobile application develop-

ment, the traditional software development life cycle

is no longer the only approach because long project

planning phases and long development cycles can re-

sult on outdated mobile applications.

There are different programming environments

available for the major mobile platforms (Wasserman,

2010), for Windows Phone there is Microsoft’s Visual

Studio environment, for Android platform there are

Android development tools plug-in for Eclipse, and

Apple iOS Dev Center has the Xcode package. Ac-

cording to Xanthopoulos and Xinogalos (Xanthopou-

los and Xinogalos, 2013) with the currently increas-

ing number of mobile platforms, developing mobile

applications has become difﬁcult for companies, as

they need to develop the same applications for each

target platform. The typical process for developing

native applications is the most appropriate way of de-

ploying mobile apps but it has one major disadvan-

tage: it is not possible to reuse the source code for

another platform; the same app must be redeveloped

from the beginning.

Mobile web applications are mainly based on

technologies such as HTML and JavaScript and do

not require installation or device upgrades, enabling

information processing functions to be initiated re-

motely on Web server (Huy and vanThanh, 2012).

Some of the web applications drawbacks are: lim-

ited access to the underlying device as hardware and

data and the extra time needed to render the web con-

tent (Xanthopoulos and Xinogalos, 2013). Hybrid de-

velopment is another approach to develop a mobile

application which tries to combine the advantages of

web and native apps where applications are primar-

ily built using HTML5 and JavaScript, and a deep

knowledge of the target platform is not required (Xan-

thopoulos and Xinogalos, 2013). According to Al-

ston (Alston, 2012), many mobile applications that

are developed are considered to be alternative appli-

cations. These applications are developed for a spe-

ciﬁc platform and it have access to the hardware of a

device through the use of Application Programming

Interfaces (APIs).

The adoption of a suitable software development

methodology is very important in mobile software en-

gineering, since software applications are changing

and evolving all the time based on immediate user

requirements (Kaleel and Harishankar, 2013). Au-

thors describe Scrum practices as the best suit require-

ments of android software development and applied

them in designing a mobile software development

methodology where they were able to successfully

develop a secure backup application using important

features from Scrum methodology such as adaptabil-

ity to evolving requirements, technically strong devel-

opment teams and effective communication through

daily meetings (Kaleel and Harishankar, 2013).

3 AGILE DEVELOPMENT

Agile development or adaptive development are

aimed to rapidly adapt to the changing reality. An

agile method emphasizes communication and collab-

oration in an iterative process (Smite et al., 2010).

The adoption of agile development makes soft-

ware processes more ﬂexible, helps in continue learn-

ing and incremental delivery, quickly and easily

adapting to requirements and technologies changes.

Moreover, agile development focuses more on the

human aspects of software engineering than the

processes, human interaction over tools and pro-

cesses (Flora and Chande, 2013). Authors also per-

formed a review and analysis on mobile application

development process using agile methodologies. Ac-

cording to authors agile development has ﬁt for mo-

bile application development. In this context, there

are studies which recommended that agile practices

are a good choice and assures different phases of

software development life cycle to solve the mobile

application development issues (Flora and Chande,

2013), they evaluated the following mobile develop-

ment process: Mobile D, RaPiD 7, Hybrid Methodol-

ogy Design, MASAM and SLeSS where they found

that work related to mobile software conﬁrms agile

practices to be a natural ﬁt for the development of

mobile applications and an appropriate agile method

could be selected for a given project and can be tai-

lored to a speciﬁc requirement based upon project’s

complexity and team size.

Agile development is recommended to small-to-

medium-sized projects, software development orga-

nizations are increasingly recognizing the need for

agility.

In literature, Extreme Programming (XP) and

Scrum are the most common agile methods for mobile

application development. According to Paasivaara et

Investigating the Adoption of Agile Practices in Mobile Application Development

491

al. (Paasivaara et al., 2008) these methods can be eas-

ily customized by software companies. We describe

these agile methods and others in the following sub-

sections.

3.1 Extreme Programming

Extreme Programming (XP) is a discipline of soft-

ware development which emphasizes productivity,

ﬂexibility, informality, teamwork, and the limited use

of technology outside of programming, working in

short cycles and every cycle starts by choosing a sub-

set of requirements from a larger set (Macias et al.,

2003).

According to Moore and Flannery (Moore and

Flannery, 2007), XP implements a groupware style

development where feedback is obtained by daily test-

ing the software where developers deliver the sys-

tem to the customers as early as possible, allow-

ing a rapid response for requirements and technolo-

gies changes. Beck (Beck, 2000) present XP as a

light-weight methodology for small-to-medium-sized

teams developing software in the face of vague or

rapidly-changing requirements.

3.2 Scrum

Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software

development approach. It offers a framework and

set of practices that keep everything visible, allowing

practitioners to know exactly what is going on and to

make adjustments in order to have the project moving

towards desired goals. The adoption of Scrum prac-

tices is the main factor to successfully develop soft-

ware projects (Scharff and Verma, 2010).

The scrum workﬂow is a sequence of iterations

called sprints which have a duration between one and

four weeks each. The team has the work foundation

as part of a product backlog which is a list of require-

ments and priorities.

Each sprint has daily meetings where each team

member answers what he/she has been done on the

previous day, what is going to be done in the current

day and if there is any roadblock to move forward on

development activities. At the end of each sprint there

is a product demo called Sprint Review and after that

it is handled a lessons learned session called Sprint

Retrospective (Reichlmayr, 2011).

4 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

We applied a questionnaire to a group of 20 stu-

dents from the iOS development training course. This

course is provide for a large software company in or-

der to train undergraduate students on mobile applica-

tion development for iOS. The course takes 4 months

duration.

In this study, we selected 20 from 87 students,

who were attending the course. We adopted a random

selection to obtain a pool of participants.

During the course, each student has his/her own

equipment to use as part of the class meetings and

projects and worked in teams from two to ﬁve in-

dividuals. The course curriculum includes the fol-

lowing subjects: Object-Oriented Programming, User

Interface (UI) components, Model View Controller,

Data sources, Navigation, Animations and Frame-

works. The course also covered an introduction to

Scrum framework. After taking theoretical lessons,

all students work for four months to develop real mo-

bile applications using agile practices to support it.

The participants are on average at the 5th semester

and majority of participants who answered the ques-

tionnaire are from an IT related ﬁeld: 30% from

Computer Science, 35% from Information Systems,

10% from Computer Engineering, 10% from Systems

Analysis and 15% from Other courses.

Another proﬁle information from the overall 87

students attending the training is that 35% of the

students already had previous software development

courses using Java and C#. In this context, 68%

had up to 3 years of experience in development, 18%

had between 3 and 5 years of experience, and 14%

had more than 5 years software development experi-

ence. Only 10% of the students had a previous contact

with mobile application development. Most of pre-

vious students experience were from other courses,

as well as from the industry. In the software devel-

opment methodology analysis, 65% did not have any

previous contact with software development method-

ologies, 20% had previous contact with some prac-

tices of agile development, and 15% had contact with

traditional software development approach. Table 1

present the participants information.

The course is facilitated by 6 instructors with ex-

perience in iOS development, academic and project

management background. Four of them, have more

than ﬁve years of experience as software developers.

The course combines elements of Challenge-Based

Learning (CBL) and Scrum in order to help the stu-

dents to develop their apps (Santos et al., 2015).

At the end of the training course, we applied

a questionnaire with eight research questions. Six

questions to collect the background information of

the participants (Name, Age, Undergraduate course,

Semester, Previous working/study experience in agile

practices, Previous working/study experience in mo-

ICEIS 2016 - 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

492

Table 1: Participants information.

Participant Age Course Semester

A 24 Computer Science 8

B 23 Information Systems 6

C 21 Computer Engineering 5

D 22 Information Systems 7

E 27 Information Systems 5

F 21 Information Systems 4

G 24 Computer Science 3

H 22 Information Systems 5

I 19 Information Systems 4

J 21 Computer Engineering 5

L 34 Systems Analysis 3

M 19 Information Systems 5

N 20 Computer Science 4

O 20 Computer Science 3

P 26 Computer Science 4

Q 20 Business 5

R 24 Systems Analysis 3

S 21 Engineering 9

T 22 Systems Analysis 7

U 24 Computer Science 5

bile development). The other two questions related

to the adoption of agile practices to develop mobile

applications. The following questions are presented:

• Q1: What are the challenges in mobile applica-

tion development?

• Q2: What is your opinion about the adoption of

agile practices for mobile application develop-

ment?

5 RESULTS

The following subsections outlines the results related

to the research questions related to the adoption of

agile practices to develop mobile applications. We

adopted the content analysis as a qualitative research

technique to identify the challenges and perceived

beneﬁts on the adoption of agile methods for devel-

oping mobile applications.

5.1 Challenges in Mobile Application

Development

In mobile application development, apart from adopt

agile or a traditional approach, developers face many

challenges. Based on our data collection, we identi-

ﬁed ﬁve main challenges related to the adoption of ag-

ile practices in mobile application development. Ta-

ble 2 shows these challenges.

• Deﬁne UI/UX (User Interface/User Experience

Design): UX was cited as one of the factors that

differ developing mobile applications for tradi-

tional applications. This is point as a challenge

Table 2: Challenges for mobile application development.

Challenges Frequency

Deﬁne UI/UX 50%

Different users’ expectations 30%

Different development platforms 20%

Continuous update 10%

Devices and applications performance 10%

because of the diversity of devices, sensors and

features that may be are utilized using a mobile

device. UI has also been cited as one of the fac-

tors that differ developing mobile applications for

traditional applications. It due to the diversity of

devices and different sizes and development plat-

forms that can be used to develop applications.

Participants explain this challenge.

I think the main difference is about UI, not

for the huge amount of different screen sizes,

but the way applications are used on a desk-

top computer was always using a keyboard

and mouse as input. We have a keyboard

when using mobile devices, but instead of the

mouse we have touch screen, that has nu-

merous other representations to click, not to

mention the use of all other sensors avail-

able, which makes creating the interface to

integrate harmoniously challenging. (Partic-

ipant B)

In my opinion, it’s different because you need

to think much more in the user experience.

Usually the applications are for a general

audience, then you should pay attention to

all aspects (accessibility, design). (Partici-

pant E)

• Different Users’ Expectations: the diversity of

users and their expectations is identiﬁed as a chal-

lenge in mobile application development. First,

a single application may have millions of users,

according to the sense that a lot of users also cor-

responds to a large diversity of users, with differ-

ent expectations, demands and devices. Another

point raised it is also the question of the speed in

which mobile solutions need to be released.

I think the main difference to develop mo-

bile (applications) over other platforms is

the proximity to the user. It is common for

a mobile application to be used by millions

of people, while a desktop system is differ-

ent. In my point of view, mobile applica-

tions can help change the lives of people in a

more direct and fast way, compared to some

other systems. The biggest challenge is to

promote solutions that really make a differ-

ence in people’s lives. (Participant J)

Investigating the Adoption of Agile Practices in Mobile Application Development

493

• Different Development Platforms: differences

between hardware and software platforms have

also been identiﬁed as one of the differences and

challenges in developing applications for mobile

devices. It due to the fact that the amount of ap-

plication program interfaces (APIs) in each of the

development platforms, as well as different fea-

tures and differences in hardware.

The great diversity of types and capabilities

of these devices also creates a challenge for

developers, because they need to develop the

system in such a way that it is able to run sat-

isfactorily in a wide range of devices. (Par-

ticipant K)

• Continuous Update: the constant updating of

technologies is also cited as one of the main chal-

lenges due to frequent updating of development

platforms, as well as the frequent launch of de-

vices with different sizes and features. A partici-

pant describe it.

As challenges, I believe the fact that you have

to keep up to date because the mobile devel-

opment is always emerging innovations, new

frameworks, new languages. (Participant C)

• Devices and Application Performance: another

issue reported by the participants is performance

on data access. It happens because of hardware

limitations. We can also observe this aspect as

an important aspect on the mobile development

based on the following answers from the partici-

pants.

It’s different, because we have to think of

something practical that ﬁts in a relatively

small screen and that is attractive. I think

the biggest challenge is to be always up-

dated and seek the best performance for the

application, or it will become obsolete very

quickly. (Participant B)

5.2 Perceived Beneﬁts of Agile Practices

for Developing Mobile Applications

Agile development as well mobile application devel-

opment are research areas with many important as-

pects to be investigated. Despite of its challenges,

we also identiﬁed a set of eight beneﬁts of the adop-

tion agile practices for developing mobile applica-

tions. Table 3 list the beneﬁts.

• Improves the Management and Control: ag-

ile process address the inherent problems of tradi-

tional development using product demand and de-

livery, and also control of ongoing projects. Thus,

Table 3: Perceived beneﬁts of agile development for devel-

oping mobile applications.

Beneﬁts Frequency

Improves the management and control 45%

Improves development speed 25%

Continuous improvement 15%

Promotes a life-cycle delivery 15%

Support multiple interactions 10%

Improves communication 10%

Improves performance 5%

Allows transparency 5%

agile processes implement control through fre-

quent inspection and adaptation and support the

project management.

I believe it is extremely important, it enables

better organization and control of tasks as

better ways to follow the team. (Participant

• Improves Development Speed: agile practices

helps to attain development velocity. It specially

because agile practices focus on short develop-

ment cycles. Agile development teams tasked to

deliver high-value features quickly.

Agile practices positively inﬂuence the mo-

bile development, because they are usually

solutions that require immediate and rapid

development. With many interactions agile

is fundamental because with this the team is

able to design and prototype a product with

more speed, unlike other methodologies. For

example, Waterfall approach validates the

implementation only at the end of the cycle.

(Participant C)

• Continuous Improvement: agile principles,

practices, and methods support continuous im-

provement. Through constant iterations, iterative

planning and review, agile development brings the

expected results.

The use of agile practices helps to make ap-

plication development safety because it is

possible to identify and eliminate failures or

unwanted behaviors quickly and accurately.

(Participant M)

• Promotes a Life-cycle Delivery: one of the great

advantages of agile software development is the

wealth of practices, techniques, and strategies that

promote a delivery life-cycle. Agile teams will

adopt a life-cycle that is the most appropriate for

their situation. The delivery life-cycle is goal-

driven.

I believe that the use of agile methods help

one mobile team to organize and deliver. Es-

ICEIS 2016 - 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

494

pecially if the project is very long. This re-

quires collecting metrics during the itera-

tions. (Participant C)

• Support Multiple Interactions: the product life-

cycle goes from the initial idea for the product,

through delivery, to operations and support and

often has many iterations of the delivery life-

cycle. Multiple iterations promote fast develop-

ment cycles and incremental improvement of ap-

plications. Furthermore, multiple iterations allow

teams not only to plan at the iteration level but

also to conduct long term release planning (Smite

et al., 2010).

I believe it is fundamental for development,

mainly by constant reviews that facilitate

troubleshooting and redeﬁnition of the scope

of the project (if needed). The various exist-

ing iterations on agile methods are extremely

important for the application’s success. Ag-

ile methods facilitate and assist mobile de-

velopment. (Participant E)

• Improves Communication: agile development

in general use a set of values, principles and prac-

tices to guide teams in being as agile as possi-

ble. It includes the adoption of models to support

communication and understanding. Their adop-

tion facilitates communication between the group

and make team members more critical.

It improves the communication and team-

work among team members providing a re-

alistic view about project progress. (Partici-

pant R)

• Improves Performance: agile practices can help

to improve the project performance in mobile de-

velopment environments. It because agile prac-

tices provide a major performance of developers.

Agile teams provide an agile plan with progress

updated every day.

I think that helps a lot in performance im-

provement. Perhaps even more than other

areas of development. It ﬁts very well with

mobile development. (Participant A)

• Allows Transparency: it was also raised as a

point of clarity and objectivity generated by the

use of agile development. Software projects only

succeed with effective planning, visibility, and co-

ordination. Agile practices promote a disciplined

project management.

My experience with agile development was

great, in my opinion it is essential to use

this methodology because it makes the devel-

opment process more objective and clearer.

(Participant B)

An important aspect to be observed in the use of

agile practices. Thus, Figure 1 presents agile prac-

tices used by the participants to develop mobile appli-

cations during the course.

Figure 1: Agile practices used by participants in this study.

The majority of the participants adopt daily scrum

meeting practice, because it helps them to keep track

of project activities and communication. The second

practice more adopted by the participants is Kanban

(a system for visualising work do be done, in progress

or completed). By the adoption of Kanban partici-

pants can see the progress of each activity, what still

need to be done, what is in progress and what is com-

pleted. Iterative planning was also reported by par-

ticipant. This practice help to organize the develop-

ment and deliverables on different interactions and

continues improvement. Small releases is also used

by participants in order to organize different deliv-

erables in accordance to the iterative planning. Pair

programming was also reported as very useful spe-

cially when participants need to learn something new

or need to work on something critical. Burndown,

continuous integration and refactoring were reported

by less than 20% of participants. Automated builds

and TDD (Test Driven Development) were reported

by less than 10% of participants.

6 DISCUSSION

Developing mobile applications can be hard due to

many reasons. In this study, we found ﬁve main chal-

lenges. These challenges are faced for both beginners

practitioners as well as more experienced developers.

We also identiﬁed eight beneﬁts of the adoption of

agile practices for mobile application development.

The majority of the answers given by interviewees

(50%) reported UI/UX as challenge for mobile ap-

plication development. According to Dalmasso et al.

(Dalmasso et al., 2013), most of the developers would

like to release apps for major mobile platforms (iOS,

Investigating the Adoption of Agile Practices in Mobile Application Development

495

Android) and provide a consistent UI and UX across

the platforms. However, developing an app for sepa-

rate mobile platforms require in-depth knowledge of

their SDKs (Software Development Kit). The devel-

oper can control all aspects of the user experience, but

a mobile application must share common elements of

the user interface with other applications and must

adhere to externally developed user interface guide-

lines (Wasserman, 2010). The diversity of mobile

platforms, as well as the variety of SDKs and other

tools contributes to increase this challenge.

Different users’ expectations and different devel-

opment platforms are reported in 30% and 20% of the

answers, respectively. This result shows that the main

elements of mobile applications, user and technology,

can pose challenges in mobile development. As well

as, it poses challenges in teaching and learning mobile

software development. We believe that this challenge

will increase over the years. It can happen due to the

increase number of new users and technologies. A

single mobile application can reach millions of users

with different devices, age groups, and supported by

different platforms.

Continuous update and devices applications per-

formance are reported in 10% of the answers given by

interviewees. These challenges have a lower percent-

age when compared to deﬁne UI/UX challenge. How-

ever, these challenges are not less important, and in

fact mobile applications are becoming more complex

and users require high-quality mobile apps (Wasser-

man, 2010).

We also identiﬁed the beneﬁts of the adoption of

agile practices for mobile application development.

The greatest beneﬁt according to our ﬁndings is to im-

prove the management and control. It makes sense,

since agile approaches are focused project manage-

ment (Scharff and Verma, 2010). At the same

time, agile practices help to increase the development

speed. It is very important in the mobile market since

new applications are available every day in the Apps

store.

The beneﬁts of agile practices adoption described

in this study are not necessarily restricted to the spe-

ciﬁc type of software development and it can also be

extended to other software application domains. On

the other hand, we identiﬁed challenges in mobile ap-

plication development domain. A further investiga-

tion should be conducted in order to explore the rela-

tionship between challenges and achieved beneﬁts.

An unexpected beneﬁt from the adoption of agile

practices was presented in terms of students engage-

ment and motivation. We did not report this beneﬁt

in Section 5.2. However, it is important to highlight

its contribution for teaching and learning mobile ap-

plication development.

Our study is helpful in uncovering the underlying

challenges and their implications on existing practice.

First, challenges identiﬁed enable further research on

more detailed activities important to consider while

implementing an agile project for mobile application

domain. Second, the beneﬁts reported here have been

mentioned by the interviewees and identiﬁed during

the coding process alongside the challenges. Sim-

ilarly to the challenges, some beneﬁts can be more

perceived than others.

6.1 Limitations of this Study

Our study was conducted with a limited number of

respondents and from the same iOS development

course. In addition, our results are drawn the view-

point of students (development teams). It is also im-

portant to notice that part of project participants were

attending a training course without previous expe-

rience with other approaches or software practices.

These features highlight the fact that participants may

become comfortable with it, and accepted the envi-

ronment challenges and its limitations.

However, our results demonstrated that on using

agile practices as part of a mobile application de-

velopment environment are similar to previous liter-

ature studies. Our results have also shown that short

development cycles and small releases are important

features on mobile application development environ-

ments. We have found indicatives in our study that ag-

ile practices are the best approaches for mobile soft-

ware development environments.

7 FINAL REMARKS

This study explores the adoption of agile practices for

mobile application development. In other words, we

investigate challenges and the students’ experience on

the adoption of agile practices. We identiﬁed ﬁve

main challenges in mobile application development

and eight beneﬁts of agile practices for developing

mobile applications.

Our results show that the main challenge to de-

velop mobile applications is to deﬁne UI and UX

followed by achieve different users’ expectations.

Regarding to the beneﬁts, we found improvements

on management and control as well as development

speed. All teams ﬁnished their application projects

(apps) delivering more than ﬁve different applications

covering areas such as games, public transportation,

services and productivity. Their apps presented a high

ICEIS 2016 - 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

496

quality and used advanced resources such as data per-

sistence, web services, etc.

Results from our study can be used to support

developers, project managers, decision makers, and

practitioners in order to choose the software devel-

opment methodology to develop a mobile application

project.

For future work, we will use the ﬁndings of this

study to design an approach for teaching and learning

mobile application development. The adoption of ag-

ile practices for mobile application development will

be further investigate in order to propose new prac-

tices and processes to support software development.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Afonso Sales is funded by CNPq-Brazil (Uni-

versal 470096/2013-6) and Paulo Fernandes is also

funded by CNPq-Brazil (PQ 307602/2013-3).

REFERENCES

Alston, P. (2012). Teaching Mobile Web Application De-

velopment: Challenges Faced and Lessons Learned.

In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference on In-

formation Technology Education, SIGITE ’12, pages

239–244, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. ACM.

Beck, K. (2000). Extreme Programming Explained Em-

brace Change. Addison-Wesley, USA, 1st edition.

Corral, L. (2012). Using Software Quality Standards to As-

sure the Quality of the Mobile Software Product. In

Proc. of the 3rd Annual Conference on Systems, Pro-

gramming, and Applications: Software for Humanity

(SPLASH’12), pages 37–40, Tucson, AZ, USA. ACM.

Dalmasso, I., Datta, S., Bonnet, C., and Nikaein, N. (2013).

Survey, comparison and evaluation of cross platform

mobile application development tools. In Wireless

Communications and Mobile Computing Conference

(IWCMC), 2013 9th International, pages 323–328.

Flora, H. K. and Chande, S. V. (2013). A review and anal-

ysis on mobile application development processes us-

ing agile methodologies. International Journal of Re-

search in Computer Science, 3(4):9 – 18.

Huy, N. P. and vanThanh, D. (2012). Evaluation of Mobile

App Paradigms. In Proceedings of the 10th Interna-

tional Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing

and Multimedia, MoMM ’12, pages 25–30, Bali, In-

donesia. ACM.

Kaleel, S. B. and Harishankar, S. (2013). Applying

agile methodology in mobile software engineering:

Android application development and its challenges.

Technical report, Department of Computer Science,

Ryerson University.

Lewis, G. A., Nagappan, N., Gray, J., Rosenblum, D.,

Muccini, H., and Shihab, E. (2013). Report of the

2013 ICSE 1st International Workshop on Engineer-

ing Mobile-enabled Systems (MOBS 2013): 12. SIG-

SOFT Software Engineering Notes, 38(5):55–58.

Macias, F., Holcombe, M., and Gheorghe, M. (2003).

A Formal Experiment Comparing Extreme Program-

ming with Traditional Software Construction. In Pro-

ceedings of the Fourth Mexican International Confer-

ence on Computer Science, pages 73–80.

Moore, A. and Flannery, W. (2007). Use of Extreme Pro-

gramming Methodologies in IT Application Design

Processes: An Empirical Analysis. In Portland Inter-

national Center for Management of Engineering and

Technology - Management of Converging Technolo-

gies, pages 2468–2475, Portland, OR, USA.

Paasivaara, M., Durasiewicz, S., and Lassenius, C. (2008).

Distributed agile development: Using scrum in a

large project. In Global Software Engineering, 2008.

ICGSE 2008. IEEE International Conference on,

pages 87–95.

Reichlmayr, T. (2011). Working towards the student Scrum

- Developing Agile Android applications. ASEE An-

nual Conference and Exposition, Conference Pro-

ceedings.

Santos, A., Sales, A., Fernandes, P., and Nichols, M.

(2015). Combining Challenge-Based Learning and

Scrum Framework for Mobile Application Develop-

ment. In Proc. of the 2015 ACM Conference on Inno-

vation and Technology in Computer Science Educa-

tion (ITiCSE’15), pages 189–194, Vilnius, Lithuania.

Scharff, C. and Verma, R. (2010). Scrum to Support Mo-

bile Application Development Projects in a Just-in-

time Learning Context. Proceedings - International

Conference on Software Engineering, pages 25–31.

Smite, D., Moe, N. B., and Gerfalk, P. J. (2010). Agility

Across Time and Space: Implementing Agile Meth-

ods in Global Software Projects. Springer Publishing

Company, Incorporated, 1st edition.

Wasserman, A. I. (2010). Software Engineering Issues for

Mobile Application Development. In Proceedings of

the FSE/SDP Workshop on Future of Software Engi-

neering Research, FoSER ’10, pages 397–400, Santa

Fe, New Mexico, USA. ACM.

Xanthopoulos, S. and Xinogalos, S. (2013). A Comparative

Analysis of Cross-platform Development Approaches

for Mobile Applications. In Proceedings of the 6th

Balkan Conference in Informatics, BCI ’13, pages

213–220, Thessaloniki, Greece. ACM.

Zhang, Y. (2015). Development of Mobile Application for

Higher Education: An Introduction. In Zhang, Y. A.,

editor, Handbook of Mobile Teaching and Learning,

pages 1–4. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Investigating the Adoption of Agile Practices in Mobile Application Development

497