Utmaningar med utveckling av mobila applikationer : En fallstudie om kravhantering ur ett utvecklingsperspektiv

The use of mobile devices has during the last years expanded and on the market you can see a huge amount of applications. The development of mobile applications differs from traditional systems development since mobility infers that mobile applications can be used in different technological and social contexts. Although previous research has recognized that mobility can present mobile application developers with certain challenges, empirical studies of how problems arise and how they can be handled has thus far been limited. In this study we focused on the requirements engineering process from a development view with the purpose of finding challenges emerging in the development process. The study is based on a qualitative case study that employed semi-structured interviews with both project managers and system developers active in the requirements process. The data gathering included seven participants from five different companies. The results of the study showed that there is a huge lack in methodology usage when developing mobile applications. Most of the requirements were focused on technical issues with developing mobile applications. It was hard to take into account the user needs since they were hard to anticipate. The respondents felt that the relationship with the customer was most important when developing, nor was it important to identify the end users. The developers often expressed that customers lacked sufficient knowledge, and that the customer had not had time to mature when it comes to mobile application development. In the study we concluded that developers need to direct more attention towards finding the end users, identify their needs, and more work towards developing a methodology that focuses on that.