Human-centered software development methodology in mobile computing environment: Agent-supported agile approach

Abstract

Due to the large demand of the services from the wireless networked computing environment, the capacity and performance of wireless devices, platforms, and applications are improved. Especially, in recent years, the use of mobile applications has increased dramatically along with the concept of 'smart' phone. As a result, the center of human e-life has been transferred from a conventional desktop space to a mobile wireless computing environment. These rapid changes also generate additional requirements for more sophisticated and complex functionalities in wireless computing environment such as personalization or adaptation which result in the requirements of 'human'-centered software development methodology in wireless computing environment. Although there are well-known classical software development methodologies such as waterfall, they do not fit to the characteristics of wireless computing environment. Instead, the agile software development methodology is generally used to deal with dynamically changing requirements in wireless computing environment. However, agile software development methodology is knowledge- and labor-intensive and does not fully cover the requirements that are essential to the wireless computing environment. In this paper, we analyze the requirements of mobile applications in wireless computing environment and propose a human-centered software development methodology which is to integrate agile philosophy and agent technology. Additionally, we employed the concepts of software product line engineering in order to understand and represent the variability of dynamically changing requirements. Consequently, what we propose in this paper is an agent-supported agile-based mobile software development methodology in wireless computing environment for supporting adaptive requirement changes and their automatic implementation. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, we have performed two experimental case studies by developing android mobile applications. © 2013 Eom and Lee.