Software engineering issues for ubiquitous computing

Abstract

In the last decade, we have experienced the advent of the paradigm of ubiquitous computing, with the goal of making computational services so pervasive throughout an environment that they become transparent to the human user. Research in ubiquitous computing raises many challenging issues for computer science in general, but successful research in ubiquitous computing requires the deployment of applications that can survive everyday use, and this in itself presents a great software engineering challenge. In our experience, we have found three features common across many ubiquitous computing applications - transparent interfaces that provide appropriate alternatives to the desktop-bound traditional graphical user interface, the ability to modify behavior of a application based on knowledge of its context of use, and the ability to capture live experiences for later recall. Building ubiquitous computing applications with these features raises software engineering problems in toolkit design, software structuring for separation of concerns and component integration. We will clarify these problems and discuss our approaches towards their solution.