A Software Assurance Model for Mobile Applications

Mobile applications have become ubiquitous, adopted by millions of users that register billions of downloads a day. To increase the competitiveness of the mobile software product, developers should care in a very detailed fashion about the qualities demanded by end users, execution targets and mobile markets. The quality of mobile applications is controlled by market policies, and is judged by customer’s reviews and ratings. Software developers need to count on reference points to assess the product against expected characteristics in an objective fashion, without the need of completing the customer feedback cycle. This work contributes on the configuration of a software assurance model that learns from well-founded quality methodologies adapting the necessary characteristics to meet the requirements of mobile software applications. We extracted the most relevant quality requirements from the mobile application market and we generated quality instruments that help developers to produce applications that meet and exceed such requirements. We implemented a Quality Function Deployment that allowed us to transform the requirements of the mobile application market into quality characteristics that can be assured in the software development cycle. In particular, we introduced the Mobile App Quality Model, that leverages the ISO/IEC 25010 quality standard as a mechanism to assure the fulfillment of the quality requirements from the mobile application stores, based on standard quality characteristics. The Mobile App Quality Model and the associated techniques presented in this thesis aim to provide the mechanisms to assess the quality of the mobile software product built upon mobile-specific, market-aware requirements. We deployed a number of case studies and surveys on custom applications and real-world products, which let us understand the actual impact of several of the quality characteristics identified by the Mobile App Quality Model, illustrating its usefulness. The case studies and surveys also served as example to exercise the different quality tools developed in this thesis for the quantitative analysis of the software product utilizing software metrics.