Controlling the “CHAOS” of Mobile App Projects

I participated recently in a “CHAOS Tuesday” interview hosted by the Standish Group on managing mobile app projects.  They were interested in learning how mobile projects are different from traditional software projects and what people should be aware of when executing mobile projects.

We discussed the top challenges of building mobile apps, which I described as:

1. Getting the UX right – for the mobile app, the user experience is king.
2. Testing across a variety of screen sizes and operating system variants, though standardization on HTML5 and JavaScript with hybrid apps helps a lot here.
3. Handling the variety of technologies and development tools that you face in choosing a mobile strategy.  It is time to learn about how to build and use REST APIs, and time to choose between building up multiple teams using multiple technologies, one for each platform, or to adopt a productive multi-platform development approach.

I talked about Progress OpenEdge Mobile with its cloud-based app building and integration back into our Eclipse-based Developer Studio.  It is a great option for developers looking to build mobile apps, with a focus on developer productivity and support for both Apple iOS and Google Android platforms for both phone and tablet with a “write-once, run-anywhere” approach.  Plus, our core OpenEdge platform has been enhanced to support the mobile apps with binding to backend data and functions.