A Company Case Study: Examining criteria in cross-platform evaluation frameworks

Sammanfattning: The world of mobile application development faces many challenges today. Software companies want their applications available on both iOS and Android platforms to reach as many users as possible but developing for each native platform separately is time consuming and takes up unnecessary resources. This is the problem that cross-platform development frameworks aim to solve. Today the market is flooded with many cross-platform frameworks to choose from. This has led to a need for companies to identify which cross-platform framework to choose based on a framework’s strengths and weaknesses. Many methods of evaluating cross-platform frameworks have been created, but the challenge of choosing the right one still prevails. This research is aimed to investigate one of these evaluation methods, claiming to be the definitive evaluation framework. This thesis was chosen to be a case study, by cooperating with a company to get insight in the industry’s view on this evaluation framework and learn their opinion of what values are important when evaluating a development framework. The evaluation framework consists of a set of 33 criteria, each aimed at evaluating different parts of a development framework and the resulting applications. In this research, we investigate 8 of these criteria in depth and explore how these could be assigned points in an objective manner. We developed one prototype for each development framework subject to evaluation and gave these points using a system based on the evaluation framework with the added extension of defining our own sub-criteria system for assigning points as objectively as possible. From the collected data during the study we could see, not only, if the company could decide which of the development frameworks in our evaluation was more suitable for their needs. If the evaluation framework performed as intended by the creators and if this was something the company could use further on, for other projects. Results from using the proposed sub-criteria system in the evaluation are also presented and discussed.