A product-line model-driven engineering approach for generating feature-based mobile applications

A significant challenge faced by the mobile application industry is developing and maintaining multiple native variants of mobile applications to support different mobile operating systems, devices and varying application functional requirements. The current industrial practice is to develop and maintain these variants separately. Any potential change has to be applied across variants manually, which is neither efficient nor scalable. We consider the problem of supporting multiple platforms as a 'software product-line engineering' problem. The paper proposes a novel application of product-line model-driven engineering to mobile application development and addresses the key challenges of feature-based native mobile application variants for multiple platforms. Specifically, we deal with three types of variations in mobile applications: variation due to operation systems and their versions, software and hardware capabilities of mobile devices, and functionalities offered by the mobile application. We develop a tool MOPPET that automates the proposed approach. Finally, the results of applying the approach on two industrial case studies show that the proposed approach is applicable to industrial mobile applications and have potential to significantly reduce the development effort and time.