Rapid Prototyping and Early Acceptance Testing of Mobile Applications

Mobile applications are finding increased acceptance in tourism, particularly tourist services like city, sport or museum guides. The potential of mobile services is difficult to estimate a priori because hardly any user acceptance tests can be carried out before having a concrete implementation of that service. Due to this fact, enterprises risk potentially high false investments because of the miscalculated decision to develop a mobile application which does not get accepted on the market. This book introduces a software framework which proposes to integrate rapid prototyping into the development process in order to be able to conduct early acceptance tests in the real user context. This approach allows savings in time and cost and increases quality and customer satisfaction. The proposed methodology is applied to the development of a mobile TourGuide. The efforts of conventional mobile software engineering of a mobile TourGuide are confronted with a prototype of the software framework as a showcase.