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Top1. Introduction
Mobile applications are penetrating very quickly in every domain like medicine, entertainment, banking, governance, learning, railways etc. Recently one of the leading newspaper (Times of India) has launched a mobile app for Nokia smart phones that offers its ocean of user with the updated news on mobile phones (http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2209615). It was also reported that by the year 2015, the number of Smartphone users will account for 80% and window phones user to 20% of the total users. The tablet shipments will rise to 50% of number of laptops.
Mobile applications are growing in complexity with the increase in the number of mobile users. Growing complexity add to the worries of its developers since delivering such a high complexity software that satisfied mass market users within time and budgets under resource constrained environment is quite a big challenge. Since the software has to be delivered in ever changing environment, thus resulting in volatile requirements, thereby resulting in enhancing regression testing efforts. By analyzing the type of changes, a decision could be made regarding the neglection or minimization of original test suite that executes modified as well as affected parts of source code. Such a neglection or minimization reduces both testing effort as well as delivery time of the increment.
All these challenges enforce the requirement for software engineers to get equipped with necessary practice and knowledge about traditional software engineering methodologies, principles, best practices and tools. Due to an increase in number of mobile users, mobile devices with complex functionalities are expected to hit the market. This will enhances the burden of development of software under market constraints like low cost, high quality and timely delivery since mobile software application development process needs to be matured enough to handle such a scalability.
Development costs of mobile applications had been a one of the worrying factor these days. Stetler (2011) presented a rough range of development cost associated with mobile application. We relied on the survey and reports given by Patel (2010), Ahlund (2010), David (2010). Ahlund (2010) reported that on average, development cost of mobile applications is $6,453. Such a cost was computed after the survey of development costs of 96 mobile application projects. Patel (2010) reported that for small sized mobile applications, the development cost lies in the range of $3,000 to $8,000. David (2010) reported the development cist to $12,000 to $150,000 or more.