Model-driven development of platform-independent mobile applications supporting role-based app variability

Abstract

The use of mobile applications has become an indispensable part of human interaction and especially of urban life. This will lead to rapidly increasing numbers of applications and users that make the development of mobile applications to one of the most promising fields in software engineering. Due to short time-to-market, differing platforms and fast emerging technologies, mobile application development faces typical challenges where model-driven development (MDD) can help. We present a modeling language and an infrastructure for the model-driven development of native apps in Android and iOS. Our approach allows flexible app development on different abstraction levels: compact modeling of standard app elements such as standard data management and increasingly detailed modeling of individual elements to cover specific behavior. Moreover, a kind of variability modeling is supported such that apps variants for a range of user roles can be developed. Several apps including a mobile learning app, a conference app, and a museum guide with augmented reality functionality demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.