Heiko Desruelle

Requirements sensemaking using concept maps

Requirements play an important role in software engineering, but their perceived usefulness means that they often fail to be properly maintained. Traceability is often considered a means for motivating and maintaining requirements, but this is difficult without a better understanding of the requirements themselves. Sensemaking techniques help us get this understanding, but the representations necessary to support it are difficult to create, and scale poorly when dealing with medium to large scale problems. This paper describes how, with the aid of supporting software tools, concept mapping can be used to both make sense of and improve the quality of a requirements specification. We illustrate this approach by using it to update the requirements specification for the EU webinos project, and discuss several findings arising from our results.

On the design and development of webinos : a distributed mobile application middleware

As personal devices become smarter, opportunities arise for sharing services, applications and data between them. While web technologies hold the promise of being a unifying layer, browsers lack functionality for supporting inter-device communication, synchronization, and security. To address this, we designed webinos: a cross-device distributed middleware providing interoperability, compatibility and security for mobile web applications. In this paper we present a case study of the webinos project, showing how the architecture of webinos was specified, designed and implemented, and reflect on several lessons learned.

Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations

The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform’s architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments.

Adaptive mobile web applications: a quantitative evaluation approach

The rapidly growing market of mobile devices has set a need for applications being available at anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Although this evolution provides users an unprecedented freedom, developers are facing the challenges caused by mobile device fragmentation. Current application development solutions are insufficiently optimized for the high diversity of mobile platforms and hardware characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the development of mobile applications. An adaptive application composition algorithm is introduced, capable of autonomously bypassing fragmentation related issues. This goal is achieved by introducing a quantitative evaluation strategy derived from the Logic Scoring of Preference (LSP) method.

Multi-device application middleware: leveraging the ubiquity of the Web with webinos

The broad range of connected devices has turned the Internet into a ubiquitous concept. In addition to desktop and laptop PCs, the Internet currently connects mobile devices, home entertainment systems, and even in-car units. From this ubiquitous evolution towards sensor-rich devices, the opportunity arises for various new types of innovative software application. However, alongside rises the issue of managing the increasing diversity of device characteristics and capabilities. As device fragmentation grows, application developers are facing the need to cover a wider variety of target devices and usage scenarios. In result, maintaining a viable balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be an important challenge when developing applications for a ubiquitous ecosystem. In this article, we present the webinos platform, a distributed Web runtime platform that leverages the Web for supporting self-adaptive cross-device applications. In order to enable the development of such immersive ubiquitous applications, we introduce and evaluate the concept of a context-aware federated overlay architecture.

Distributed Sensor-Driven Web Applications through Multi-device Usage Patterns

To access their computer applications and services, people tend to use an increasing variety of consumer electronic devices. Devices range from laptops and netbooks, to smartphones and tablets, and even interactive television sets. In the context of mobile applications, this ubiquitous revolution allows for various multi-device use cases and scenarios that are based on a user’s dynamic usage patterns. In this paper we discuss how people can access an application using multiple devices, both in sequence as well as in parallel. Moreover, we elaborate on the technological opportunities and challenges for such multi-device enabled applications.

Context-Driven Progressive Enhancement of Mobile Web Applications: A Multicriteria Decision-Making Approach

Personal computing has become all about mobile and embedded devices. As a result, the adoption rate of smartphones is rapidly increasing and this trend has set a need for mobile applications to be available at anytime, anywhere and on any device. Despite the obvious advantages of such immersive mobile applications, software developers are increasingly facing the challenges related to device fragmentation. Current application development solutions are insufficiently prepared for handling the enormous variety of software platforms and hardware characteristics covering the mobile eco-system. As a result, maintaining a viable balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue when developing mobile applications. This article proposes a context-aware software platform for the development and delivery of self-adaptive mobile applications over the Web. An adaptive application composition approach is introduced, capable of autonomously bypassing context-related fragmentation issues. This goal is achieved by incorporating and validating the concept of fine-grained progressive application enhancements based on a multicriteria decision-making strategy.

An Internet-Based Architecture Supporting Ubiquitous Application User Interfaces

Maintaining a viable balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue when developing mobile software applications. The diversity of devices running third-party developed software applications is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. With the help of Web technology and the Internet infrastructure, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nevertheless, the variety of presentation and interaction modalities still limit the number of targetable devices. In this chapter we present webinos, a multi-device application platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto we describe webinos’ model-based user interface framework as a means to support context-aware adaptiveness for applications that are executed in such ubiquitous computing environments.

Architectural modifiability considerations for designing a multi-device web application platform

Abstract The mobile web has enabled applications to become available anywhere, anytime and on any device. Numerous emerg- ing web applications have the ability to execute and collaborate across a wide range of web-enabled devices. However, due to the increasing variety of target delivery contexts, the development of such mobile applications has led to a strong need for adaptive software engineering. To address this significant issue, webinos was designed. Webinos is a multi-device distributed platform for ubiquitous web-based applications. In this paper we discuss the architectural modifiability tactics and patterns that were considered for the design of the webinos platform. Moreover, we reflect on the implementation details of realizing such a modifiable architectural design.