Project Life Cycle-mobile application project - XML

The development life cycle of a mobile application project involves the following three phases:

• Project initiation
• Project execution
• Project deployment

We will only discuss the project execution phase because this phase is different from the earlier projects discussed in this book.

The Project Execution Phase

As you know, you create the design of the application in the project execution phase. After you create the design, you develop the application. The project execution phase consists of the following stages:

• Requirements analysis
• Design
• Construction
• Testing

In the subsequent sections, we will detail the tasks that the team members perform in each of these stages.

Requirements Analysis

During the requirements analysis phase, the development team at Rent-a-Car analyzed the need to create a Web service. The analysis was done on the basis of the problem stated by Raymond Sutton, the company's marketing manager.

Sutton commented, "We need to increase our visibility and reach; therefore, we need to make our services easily accessible. In addition, our services should be made accessible at all times and from various devices including a mobile phone."

Based on the previous problem statement, the development team analyzed the following requirements:

• The Web service will provide data to both an HTML-based site and a mobile application.
• The Web service should expose operations that allow a user to make reservations, view reservation details for a specified customer, and modify and delete reservations.
• Therefore, the customer should be able to make reservations, view reservation details, and modify and delete reservations from a mobile phone.

Design

During the design phase of the application, the development team decides on the functionality to be implemented and the technology to be used. To create a Web service for Rent-a-Car, the development team decides to use Visual Studio .NET primarily for the following reasons:

• The original Web site for the organization is already built by using ASP.NET.
• Visual Studio .NET provides a complete set of tools for building both Web services and mobile applications.

As a result, the team decides to develop both applications—the Web service and the mobile application that consumes it—by using Visual Studio .NET and the Mobile Internet Toolkit.

Construction

During this phase, the team constructs the application. The primary tasks that the team needs to perform in this phase are discussed in the following list:

• Create a Web service to expose the functionality required to allow a client application to reserve a car, find the rental cost, and modify and delete a reservation.
• Create a mobile application that will consume the Web service.

Testing

In the testing phase, various tests and validations are carried out on the application, and the functionality is checked. The Web service is tested by running the mobile application in a browser window, such as Internet Explorer.