This thesis is aimed at evaluating the suitability of agile methods for mobile application
development projects, bringing a set of improvements to an established agile method
called Mobile-D, and providing tool support to enable these improvements, facilitating
performance testing and usage logging in the lifecycle. The motivation for this work is
to better understand mobile development, and to improve related activities through
research in the field and development of a support tool. After establishing agile
methods as a good approach towards mobile application development, a number of
improvements to the Mobile-D method are presented, including a study in mobile
application categories, related paradigms, end-user inclusion in the lifecycle, as well as
performance testing of components and adoption of software product line principles.
The support tool enabling some of these improvements is then presented, with
functionalities including performance testing for Android components, usage logging
and automatic test case generation. These contributions intend to bring Mobile-D closer
to an ideal mobile application development methodology, while providing useful
features that can be outside the process, either in the form of practices or tools.