Abstract
The mobile technology became an important tool for nowadays society, allowing fast and easy access to information, becoming useful on both the user's professional and personal life. However, the mobile environment involves many technologies, turning into a complex subject for software development, where it's necessary to pay attention to many variables in order to ensure the project's quality. Therefore, the present study was conducted with a mobile software development company, analyzing and contributing to the company's activity in order to identify common problems related to an application management and development. It was found issues related to the software interface and quality control processes, also covering the migration from a local database to a cloud service.
TopBackground
As users of the mobile technology, people might assume that have enough understanding of the mobile ecosystem to plan and develop an application for those devices, especially those who have experience on development with other platforms. Such assumption can impact the software negatively, where the developer may bring bad habits to the software from their other experiences, since some procedures and interactions made through different platforms don’t necessarily are functional or good practices when migrated to portable devices. As Fling (2009) exposes on his work, it’s normal to a person unfamiliar with mobile development to assimilate the mobile ecosystem to the Internet and so think that the same rules might apply on both, however, the mobile technology is composed of multiple different parts communicating with each other, including the Internet, meaning that it’s necessary to know both the facets of Internet and the remain systems to properly understand the mobile technology and which rules should apply to it.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Web Service: A solution for communication between devices through the internet, using a common protocol to transfer data.
Software Interface: A point of interaction between different components. This interaction involves the how the user can interact with the application through involving both the hardware and the software itself.
JSON and XML: Encoding formats to transmit information in a textual format, being human-readable.
Web Application: A software available as a website, being unnecessary to have the application installed a device, becoming possible its execution in different platforms.
Friendly Interface: A user-friendly interface is a software interface where the user can easily understand and navigate through the application in an efficient way.
Script: In computing, a script is a list of commands to be executed which could also be conducted by a human, automating the process.
Software Framework: Best practices for the technology, providing generic guidelines to developers to facilitate the development process.
Logic Error: In computing, they are errors where the application operates inappropriately, however, the failure does not terminate the software, such as performing a different action than expected when pressing a button.
HTTP Protocol: A communication protocol over the internet used for client-server interaction, working on a request-response system, where the user requests for an information, being them transferred by the server through this protocol.