Software development processes for mobile systems: Is agile really taking over the business?

Mobile applications differ from desktop software due to their particular execution environment, limited resources, high autonomy requirement, market competition, etc. This situation brings the need of having customized development processes that respond efficiently to these challenges, to facilitate the development of high quality products that are able to excel and remain competitive in this domain. While a number of research papers have consistently proposed the adoption of Agile practices, it is not clear how a software development process would help to solve the issues present in the mobile domain. Moreover, there is a lack of evidence that shows a clear link between the proposed methodologies and their utilization in a real-world setting. Finally, the rapid evolution of the mobile environment challenges several of the premises upon which the proposed methodologies were created. In this paper, we present a review on Agile software development processes for mobile applications and their implementations, with the objective of knowing the contribution of Agile methods to address the needs of the mobile software in a production environment. Our goal is to introduce discussion on the need of conducting research that unveils what is the framework of choice of the mobile software industry: if the Agile paradigm was adopted, dismissed, or a new one was created.