Model-Driven Development of Mobile Applications Allowing Role-Driven Variants

Rapidly increasing numbers of applications and users make the development of mobile applications to one of the most promising fields in software engineering. Due to short time-to-market, differing platforms and fast emerging technologies, mobile application development faces typical challenges where model-driven development can help. We present a modeling language and an infrastructure for the model-driven development (MDD) of Android apps supporting the specification of different app variants according to user roles. For example, providing users may continuously configure and modify custom content with one app variant whereas end users are supposed to use provided content in their variant. Our approach allows a flexible app development on different abstraction levels: compact modeling of standard app elements, detailed modeling of individual elements, and separate provider models for specific custom needs. We demonstrate our MDD-approach at two apps: a phone book manager and a conference guide being configured by conference organizers for participants.