Previously submitted to: JMIR Formative Research (no longer under consideration since Jun 25, 2022)
Date Submitted: Feb 2, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
App Development in a Sports Science Setting: Lessons Learned and Best Practice Recommendations from a Questionnaire Study at the Institute for Sports and Sports Science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
ABSTRACT
Background:
Applications (apps) for smartphones and tablets are part of our daily life. Such apps give new opportunities for the health sector to improve the well-being of individuals and to support research. Good application development practices are essential for the success of an application.
Objective:
The objective of this study was to assess the current state of software engineering expertise in an academic sport science setting and to identify recommendations for successful project implementation.
Methods:
We conducted a questionnaire study to get insights in the actual development process for apps in a typical academic setting. The participants were (33 (SD=7) years, 58% were female) were recruited within the sport science faculty at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The major topics of the survey developed by a multidisciplinary team were demographics, project information, development process, requirements and features, security, technology, and dissemination.
Results:
The questionnaire gave us a good overview on the heterogeneity of development projects and potential shortcomings. These shortcomings exist along the complete development lifecycle (e.g. development methodology, requirements engineering).
Conclusions:
Based on these findings, we have proposed recommendations to improve the success probability and the sustainability of app development in a research context and give orientation on the potential roles that sport scientists should take.
Citation
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Copyright
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