Theme: Current and Future Challenges in Mobile Software Engineering

Mobile devices are increasingly providing more and better capabilities due to more powerful processors, improved battery life, and larger amounts of on-board sensors. More capabilities combined with changing user expectations and characteristics, such as an “always on” mentality, wider user age range, and “is there an app for that?”, are pushing the limits of mobile software engineering. As many recent experiences trying to build and deploy a range of COVID-19 apps has shown, many challenges persist including performance, energy, robustness, usability, accessibility, security, and privacy.

Several techniques have been proposed to deal with these challenges, such as tradeoff analysis, leveraging sensors for user input, context awareness via sensors, defensive programming, computation offload. However, have techniques such as these really become part of the software engineering process for building mobile systems? Do these techniques address all of today’s challenges? What about tomorrow’s challenges? Can we learn from or influence software engineering practices in other related domains such as cyber-physical systems, Internet of Things (IoT), digital twins, healthcare, and wireless sensor networks?

This panel at MobileSoft 2020 will bring together experts from industry and academia to discuss the current and future challenges in mobile software engineering.