Performance evaluation of mobile software systems: Challenges for a software engineer

New Advances in mobile computer technology, along with rapid growth of quality and quantity of wireless networks, introduce new capabilities, applications, and concerns to computer science and industry. Unique requirements and constraints of mobile systems bring new challenges to software development for such environments. It demands reconsidering the traditional approaches of information access, software design, and performance evaluation. Despite the various constraints and problems, research endeavors aimed at ameliorating the status quo through enhancing/devising software design and performance evaluation techniques for mobile software systems have been relatively few and far in between. In this paper, we aim to investigate the challenges of development and performance evaluation of mobile software systems. After reviewing mobile systems' characteristics, we investigate the current status of different approaches on improvement and evaluation of performance of mobile software systems. Then, the factors that make performance evaluation of mobile systems a challenging task are categorized. At last, we collect a set of performance metrics for evaluation of mobile systems, with the purpose of considering special characteristics of mobility.