Caveats in Eliciting Mobile App Requirements

Factors such as app stores or platform choices heavily affect functional and non-functional mobile app requirements. We surveyed 45 companies and interviewed ten experts to explore how factors that impact mobile app requirements are understood by requirements engineers in the mobile app industry. We observed a lack of knowledge in several areas. For instance, we observed that all practitioners were aware of data privacy concerns, however, they did not know that certain third-party libraries, usage aggregators, or advertising libraries also occasionally leak sensitive user data. Similarly, certain functional requirements may not be implementable in the absence of a third-party library that is either banned from an app store for policy violations or lacks features, for instance, missing desired features in ARKit library for iOS made practitioners turn to Android. We conclude that requirements engineers should have adequate technical experience with mobile app development as well as sufficient knowledge in areas such as privacy, security and law, in order to make informed decisions during requirements elicitation.Comment: The 24th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE 2020

Designing a Mobile App for Museums According to the Drivers of Visitor Satisfaction

The aim of this study is to identify the key factors as antecedents of visitor satisfaction for the design of a mobile app for museums. To our aim we use the Kano model that allows to categorize service attributes according to how they are perceived by customers and to estimate their impact on customer satisfaction. We collected qualitative data trough 300 questionnaires administered to tourists visiting the Sicilian cities of Palermo and Trapani over a period of 3 months (October- December 2012). The results of our analysis can be relevant for museum and public managers to plan strategic and operative activities, for researcher in the field of touristic marketing, for application developers, and for all those concerned with touristic and cultural heritage issues

Mobility and Security in the New Way of Working: Employee Satisfaction in a Choose Your Own Device(CYOD) Environment

The consumerization of IT, known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), is an inevitable component in the future IT infrastructure of organizations. It is not the question if employees will use consumer IT products for their work, but how and under which conditions. The use of personalized mobile devices may be beneficial for both the employee and organization, but the concern of IT executives, on corporate data residing on uncontrolled mobile devices, is often leading to a restrictive policy. Giving employees the ability to choose from a variety of secure devices, at the expense of the organization, Choose Your Own Device (CYOD), may well bring the best of two worlds. In this research 126 employees at four multinational organizations were surveyed on their perception of usability and satisfaction of devices for their knowledge tasks. The outcomes were matched against a Risk Assessment on seven identified IT threats. The results show that a majority (52%) believes their performance would improve, when given the ability to choose a device of their own. The Risk Assessment shows that IT security risks do not need to increase, provided that the proper security policies are in place. This implies that the performance and satisfaction of employee can improve in a secure CYOD environment

Animations in Cross-Platform Mobile Applications: An Evaluation of Tools, Metrics and Performance

Along with the proliferation of high-end and performant mobile devices, we find that the inclusion of visually animated user interfaces are commonplace, but that research on their performance is scarce. Thus, for this study, eight mobile apps have been developed for scrutiny and assessment to report on the device hardware impact and penalties caused by transitions and animations, with an emphasis on apps generated using cross-platform development frameworks. The tasks we employ for animation performance measuring, are those of (i) a complex animation consisting of multiple elements, (ii) the opening sequence of a side menu navigation pattern, and (iii) a transition animation during in-app page navigation. We employ multiple performance profiling tools, and scrutinize metrics including frames per second (FPS), CPU usage, device memory usage and GPU memory usage, all to uncover the impact caused by executing transitions and animations. We uncover important differences in device hardware utilization during animations across the different cross-platform technologies employed. Additionally, Android and iOS are found to differ greatly in terms of memory consumption, CPU usage and rendered FPS, a discrepancy that is true for both the native and cross-platform apps. The findings we report are indeed factors contributing to the complexity of app development.Animations in Cross-Platform Mobile Applications: An Evaluation of Tools, Metrics and PerformanceacceptedVersio