Development

Mobile applications are fraught with risk. The unique, portable nature and multiple uses of mobile devices bring a wide variety of critical quality properties into play: reliability, usability, security, availability, and maintainability. Allocating the effort to identify and ensure these properties is a difficult challenge—and not for the faint of heart. New testing and validation approaches must be used if we are to meet quality goals for mission-critical and widely distributed mobile applications.

It could be on your wrist or your ankle. It may be embedded in your jacket, your shoe, your vest, or your hat. It may eventually be under your skin. It may help you walk or talk; find your way; or communicate with a friend, with your doctor, or your coach. It monitors your heart rate, the moisture on your skin, every breath you take, and every move you make. And it’s connected. And networked. Wearable devices are here to stay and are projected to be a $30 billion market by 2018.

With the interest in wearable technology exploding, UX practitioners and development teams need to focus on creating experiences that intuitively fit the rhythm and ecosystem of a user’s daily life. Unfortunately, much like what happened early on with mobile design, wearable UX designers seem to have unlearned many of the best practices and heuristics they employ on, for example, desktop design.

Wearables and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices are optimized for gathering data about a user and their environment. According to Cisco, this emerging industry will produce and deliver over 20 billion devices worldwide by 2020. Join Chris Beauchamp to learn about how to leverage mobile apps to develop a compelling user experience with one or several connected wearable or IoT devices. He’ll discuss the options for transmitting data from and to devices and how to ensure these connections are happening in real time once the app is live.

For better or for worse—like it or not—mobile wearables are already changing our lives. Mobile wearable devices form a new generation of personalized technology that knows us better than our closest friends do. How many of your friends know how far you walked or what you ate? The challenge for developing wearable applications is incorporating the proper context to add value potential users haven’t considered—while being sensitive to their privacy.

In ten years, the applications we develop—mobile, embedded, wearable, and more—will be radically different from today’s apps. And so will be the testing and quality tools, methods, and solutions we employ. Extrapolated from his experiences at Google, Microsoft, and Applause (formerly uTest), Jason Arbon leads a thought-provoking look into the future. Our new world will be powered by nearly infinite—and almost free—computing power, storage, and networking. Standardized software stacks and centralized testing as a service will enable machine learning not possible today.

Geolocation enhances the experience of many services and provides users with customized results based on their current location. Many people don’t realize what an important role geolocation can play in locating their favorite beer—and Untappd, a mobile application around beer discovery, can help! Greg Avola offers a case study on how Untappd is employing geolocation to enhance the experience for its users and how geolocation has helped Untappd grow its business. Adding location to Untapped personalized the app and provided data that shows users what is being consumed locally.

The emergence of wearable devices like Google Glass, Apple Watch, and many others—combined with contactless technology such as near field communications—are being combined in new applications for payment processing, banking, and much more. Adopting wearables for contactless transactions will require technology shifts by both merchants and consumers. Using Google Glass as the wearable example, David Meyer demonstrates how users can see their account balance inside Google Glass to make purchase decisions, transmit the purchase authorizations, and transfer funds between their bank accounts.

Mobile application development is now a mission-critical component of IT organizations and a big part of software industry’s landscape. Due to the security threats associated with mobile devices, it is critical we build our apps—from the ground up—to be secure and trustworthy. However, many application developers and testers do not understand how to build and test secure mobile applications. Jeffery Payne discusses the risks associated with mobile platforms/applications and describes proven practices for ensuring the safety of your mobile applications.

Building mobile apps in today’s highly dynamic environment comes with great uncertainty and risk. It’s imperative to make the right design choices early on. Poor architectural decisions can make or break an app. In this technical session, Shadi Saifan focuses on the architecture and design considerations critical for building a winning mobile application—regardless of the device, operating system, or language.