Agile Development Methods for Mobile Applications

This thesis is aimed at evaluating the suitability of agile methods for mobile application development projects, bringing a set of improvements to an established agile method called Mobile-D, and providing tool support to enable these improvements, facilitating performance testing and usage logging in the lifecycle. The motivation for this work is to better understand mobile development, and to improve related activities through research in the field and development of a support tool. After establishing agile methods as a good approach towards mobile application development, a number of improvements to the Mobile-D method are presented, including a study in mobile application categories, related paradigms, end-user inclusion in the lifecycle, as well as performance testing of components and adoption of software product line principles. The support tool enabling some of these improvements is then presented, with functionalities including performance testing for Android components, usage logging and automatic test case generation. These contributions intend to bring Mobile-D closer to an ideal mobile application development methodology, while providing useful features that can be outside the process, either in the form of practices or tools. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Mr. Stuart Anderson, for all the insightful ideas, suggestions and feedback I've received throughout my work. I would also like to thank the " Dinu Patriciu " Foundation for funding my studies; I am grateful for the opportunity they have given me. Special thanks to Panos Tsogas and to Marinos Argyrou who kindly provided his Android application for me to experiment with. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their full support during my studies. iii Declaration I declare that this thesis was composed by myself, that the work contained herein is my own except where explicitly stated otherwise in the text, and that this work has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification except as specified.