Abstract
This paper presents a new interdisciplinary approach to support context modeling in context-awareness software developments. The premise of this approach relies on the idea that understanding a complex socio-technical ecology, while adapting the software to its behavior and evolution, is a primary challenge to address. Thus, the paper proposes an activity theory-based approach to aid in the conception, design, development, and evolution of emerging context-aware socio-technical ecologies. The concepts and notations used by the proposed approach are illustrated through a proof of concept that demonstrates the essential ideas and their use in real scenarios. Also, the feasibility of this approach is measured empirically through an experiment. Preliminary results show how, for a context-aware software design and development team, the proposal provides a better understanding of context than alternatives and helps to outline context models by establishing relationships and interactions between socio-technical components and by anticipating potential conflicts among them. The key ideas of the proposed approach result in the ability to analyze and model social and technological contexts around perpetually evolving system ecologies as useful representations for understanding operating environments closely tied to human actions, with software as a mediator component.
Highlights
Received: 8 November 2021The development of context-aware software systems is plagued by complexity
When addressing software context awareness in analysis and design, many underlying issues arise. These issues are mainly related to the nature of these software systems, especially those closely integrated with components that allow recognition, localization, or adaptation
These research questions were aimed towards establishing the truth value of the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 1 (H1): The use of an activity theory-based approach does not significantly influence context modeling for context-aware software development
Summary
When addressing software context awareness in analysis and design, many underlying issues arise These issues are mainly related to the nature of these software systems, especially those closely integrated with components that allow recognition, localization, or adaptation. The present work is an attempt to address this challenge, by proposing a heuristic-oriented approach rooted in a socio-technical perspective This solution supports, as one of its contributions, the use of activity theory for the tasks of gathering, describing, designing, and modeling contexts. The paper is structured as follows: this introductory section presents general ideas about the problem addressed and its existing solutions It provides a quick overview of activity theory as the main theoretical and instrumental foundation of the current proposal.
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