An aggregate indicator for mobile application quality assessment

Authors : Paul POCATILU, ION IVAN, ALIN ZAMFIROIU, CATALIN BOJA

Pages : 956-973

Doi:10.3906/elk-1304-147

View : 19 | Download : 11

Publication Date : 0000-00-00

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :The mobile applications environment has a multitude of particularities generated by the complex system of devices, hardware, and software profiles and categories of users. The mobile industry has also evolved rapidly in the last 5 years from single-core mobile platforms to multiple-core mobile application platforms, able to compete in terms of user services with notebooks. New types of devices, like tablets, or shifts in human-computer interface paradigms from button click to screen touch, have opened new perspectives both for users and software developers. This requires an adaptable approach for performance analysis in terms of total quality management for software projects. In this context, quality is analyzed from the viewpoints of developers, of users and, respectively, of one who aims to recover an investment. This paper proposes a mobile application quality estimation model that requires the identification of features such as mode of interaction, command speeds, interaction time, drivability, volume of provided information, error management, self-healing, integrability, data security, transaction security, coefficients determining importance and building an aggregate indicator, and which properties should be highlighted for ensuring usability in a practical environment. The indicator is integrated in a quality metric used to assess mobile applications` quality. Emphasizing the usefulness of the indicator is done on a representative set of mobile computing applications. The paper proposes a set of indicators normalized on the [0; 1] interval used to measure the application quality level.
Keywords : Total quality management, mobile application, aggregate indicator, software metric