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

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

MOBILESoft vs ICSE

Research Agenda

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