Importance of software architectures in mobile projects

Mobile projects often exhibit architectural issues. In this paper, we survey three different types of persons (instructors, students, and developers) to find out how often do those who write code struggle with architectural issues and how are those issues impacting their work. Our focus was on mobile projects, but to have a comprehensive overview, we have also questioned students – who might become mobile developers, to see if they understand the importance of architecture in their projects. We were also interested in instructors and their experience with the students on whether or not they lack architectural knowledge. Our research has found that all the questioned developers struggle with architectural issues in their projects, over 60% of the students had to re-write a project due to architectural issues, and over 94% of the questioned instructors stated that students have architectural issues in the projects they develop. The vast majority of the participants to the survey (100% of instructors, 100% of students, and 90% of developers) agreed that a tool that could validate the software architecture would help them.