Reporting on the SWEBOK project, the authors-who represent the project's editorial team-discuss the three-phase plan to characterize a body of knowledge, a vital step toward developing software engineering as a profession.

Mobile devices and applications provide significant advantages to their users, in terms of portability, location awareness, and accessibility. A number of studies have examined usability challenges in the mobile context, and proposed definitions of mobile application usability and methods to evaluate it. This paper presents the state of the art of the evaluation and measurement of mobile application usability.

This paper presents an empirical study based on a set of measures to evaluate the usability of mobile applications running on different mobile operating systems, including Android, iOS and Symbian. The aim is to evaluate empirically a framework that we have developed on the use of the Software Quality Standard ISO 9126 in mobile environments, especially the usability characteristic. To do that, 32 users had participated in the experiment and we have used ISO 25062 and ISO 9241 standards for objective measures by working with two widely used mobile applications: Google Apps and Google Maps. The QUIS 7.0 questionnaire have been used to collect measures assessing the users’ level of satisfaction when using these two mobile applications. By analyzing the results we highlighted a set of mobile usability issues that are related to the hardware as well as to the software and that need to be taken into account by designers and developers in order to improve the usability of mobile applications.