After successful completion of the course, students are able to...
- design and develop mobile apps for Android or iOS independently
- evaluate different development frameworks in terms of their strengths and weaknesses and assess their suitability for a given problem
- understand critical security aspects for mobile app development and take them into account during development
The professional development of mobile apps on modern tablets and smartphones is still a methodical patchwork from an engineering point of view, i.e. with regard to the professional execution of a project, as it is common in modern software engineering. There are various reasons for this:
- Weaknesses in the available frameworks
- Ongoing technology change due to strong evolution of the devices
- Change in the technology landscape and sensors
- Elaborate coordination of the topics performance, security, usability, interface design, marketing, process changes in workflows combined with the wide range of possibilities
- Problems of resource conservation for methods of testing for the technology
- Emergence and integration problems in IoT and M2M
- Lack of availability of experienced (app) engineers
- Lack of global experience with this new technology
- General weaknesses in End2End-Engineering with Mobile Apps as end system
Experienced engineers of large projects experience the development of mobile apps as unstructured tinkering with strengths in some topics and problem areas, but without the profound usual overall content and the building of sustainability. They often wish for other developers, without understanding that the problems of the topic or basic technology are simply problems of the youth of this new discipline.
All in all, the implementation of solutions with smart (current and future) devices will remain complex and semi-structured for some time. The present FVO approaches this topic from the perspective of the overall project manager and responsible (app) software engineer. None of the individual topics of the FVO can solve the overall problem, but the sum of the contents, experiences, technologies and suggestions can make the mobile app development a bit more professional. This is the goal of the LVA.
The lectures cover the following topics:
- Android and iOS app development
- Mobile Prototyping
- Platform Guidelines
- Mobile testing and test automation
- Security Aspects
- Continuous integration and DevOps for mobile apps
The course is divided into a lecture and an exercise part. In the lecture important basics of the holistic approach for the development of mobile applications as well as related technology approaches and methods are presented and discussed. Due to the complexity of the topic it is not possible to present all subject details in single lecture units in the necessary depth (for professional implementation). Here the LVA refers to in-depth literature. The aim is to strengthen the view of the overall project.
In the practice part, a task is to be developed in small groups from the initial concept to the production-related app. Great importance is attached to the communication of platform-specific best practices regarding UX and design patterns.
