Agile Beeswax: Mobile App Development Process and Empirical Study in Real Environment
Metadata
Show full item recordEditorial
MDPI
Materia
Agile Methodologies Mobile application development process Mobile application issues and challenges Process improvement Software engineering Sustainable software development Surveys
Date
2021Referencia bibliográfica
Alrabaiah, H.A.; Medina-Medina, N. Agile Beeswax: Mobile App Development Process and Empirical Study in Real Environment. Sustainability 2021, 13, 1909. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su13041909
Sponsorship
Spanish Government European Commission RTI2018-096986-B-C32Abstract
Mobile application development is a highly competitive environment; agile methodologies
can enable teams to provide value faster, with higher quality and predictability, and a better attitude
to deal with the continuous changes that will arise in the mobile context application (App), and the
positive impact of that on sustainable development through continuous progress. App development
is different from other types of software. For this reason, our objective is to present a new agilebased methodology for app development that we call Agile Beeswax. Agile Beeswax is conceived
after identifying the mobile development process’s issues and challenges, and unique requirements.
Agile Beeswax is an incremental, iterative development process composed of two main iterative
loops (sprints), the incremental design loop and the incremental development loop, and one bridge
connecting these two sprints. Agile Beeswax is structured in six phases, idea and strategy, user
experience design, user interface design, design to development, handoff and technical decisions,
development, and deployment and monitoring. One of its main strengths is that it has been created
with academic and business perspectives to bring these two communities closer. To achieve this
purpose, our research methodology comprises four main phases: Phase 1: Extensive literature review
of mobile development methodologies, Phase 2: Interviews with mobile application developers
working in small to medium software companies, Phase 3: Survey to extract valuable knowledge
about mobile development (which was carefully designed based on the results of the first and the
second phases), and Phase 4: Proposal of a new methodology for the agile development of mobile
applications. With the aim of integrating both perspectives, the survey was answered by a sample of
35 experts, including academics and developers. Interesting results have been collected and discussed
in this paper (on issues such as the development process, the tools used during this process, and the
general issues and challenges they encountered), laying the foundations of the methodology Agile
Beeswax proposed to develop mobile apps. Our results and the proposed methodology are intended
to serve as support for mobile application developers.