Towards a usability maturity model in mobile application development

The growing demand of mobile applications in the market has raised questions in the software industry as to the most appropriate development methods to satisfy current software special characteristics. Numerous studies propose the adoption of agile methods as the most appropriate ones, given their flexibility to adapt to such a changing context. However, due to the highly evolutionary character of this type of environments, there is little scientific evidence to support a clear idea of how the development and management of these projects is carried out in organizations. The incorporation of maturity models in mobile application development would allow organizations to have a thorough knowledge of the subject and to carry out improvements in their development process. A fundamental aspect of the quality in mobile applications is usability, which can only be attained by introducing user-centered design criteria in the development process. In this paper, we set forth the development of a usability maturity model in the mobile application development process. We present the research methodology that we are developing along this line and the results obtained that justify the research.