Piloting a Mobile-App Ecosystem for Smart Farming

Mobile apps increasingly constitute complete ecosystems to support businesses such as farming. Software architects and engineers from John Deere and the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering recently piloted a mobile-app ecosystem for farmers, focusing on data's role in architecting. Having the right data at the right time at the right place is crucial for high user productivity and a good user experience. In particular, offline capability is important but difficult. The authors describe a custom solution for offline capability and share lessons learned regarding data-related architecture decisions.