Building Enterprise Mobile Apps? Try this...

One of the better resources out there on mobile development and the mobile market in general is Simon Judge's Mobile Phone Development site. In it, a multitude of topics are covered regarding building and delivering mobile apps efficiently and effectively. 

One insightful posting from Simon discusses the challenges on inter-dependencies on systems as they relate to mobile app development. You can read the posting Saving Mobile Development Time, Effort and Cost here. In the post, he mentions:

In mobile, dependencies tends to be the server side, embedded data, UI graphical assets and sometimes localised text. The problem is that these are often not ready when the app is developed causing placeholders to be used. When the actual items become available there are often problems to be resolved that might have been more efficiently been resolved when the code was actually designed/written.

I couldn't agree more, and this is a prime example of where the new trend of Service Virtualization can have a tangible impact on the delivery of your mobile apps. By using the capabilities that an SV solution provides to abstract away the back-end server side components that most enterprise mobile apps rely on, development and test teams are unlocked, and able to execute in parallel while those back-end pieces, web services or data models are being built and finalized. 

With all of the complexity and lack of mature tooling that mobile developers and testers currently have to deal with, having the ability to remove the constraint of off-device systems should be greatly appreciated.

This is something that many large enterprises we talk to are looking to take advantage of.