The End of Mobile Software Engineering (As We Know It)

Mobile Software Engineering

Before 2008

2008

Exponential Growth

Source: https://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/app-count/

Recognized Research Need

Despite the development of 300,000+ mobile applications, there’s still not much formal research around their engineering processes.

Wasserman (2010)

[…] the growth of this new computing platform has outpaced the software engineering work tailored to mobile application development.

Dehlinger and Dixon (2011)

Research Agenda of Wasserman (2010)

  • User Experience
  • Code reuse
  • Networking
  • Energy efficiency
  • Data integrity
  • Testing
  • Portability and cross-platform development

Dedicated Conferences

The End of Mobile Software Engineering (As We Know It)…

MOBILESoft vs ICSE

Research Agenda

…And I Feel Fine

Mobile Is Eating The World

End of Need for Separate Research

  • Mobile is more relevant than ever
  • Separate research need is coming to an end
  • Good opportunities for future research

Existing Research

  • Reconsider research results
  • Is mobile-specific research generalizable?
  • Are there undiscovered classic results applicable to mobile software engineering?

Future Research

  • Mobile-related research should consider generalizability
  • Software Engineering research should consider implications for mobile devices

Thank you for your attention!