Vaninha Vieira

Designing context-sensitive systems: An integrated approach

Context-sensitive systems (CSS) are computer systems that use context to provide more relevant services or information to support users performing their tasks, where context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation in which something exists or occurs. CSS demand that designers consider new aspects and challenges in comparison to traditional applications. In a preliminary experiment, we observed that developers find it difficult to include the concept of context in their applications. However, only few approaches offer integrated domain-independent support on developing CSS. This paper presents an integrated approach to assist the design of CSS. The originality of this work lies on the proposed way of thinking about context, on the proposed context metamodel and on the specification of a process for designing CSS. The metamodel supports building context models by making explicit the concepts related to context manipulation and by separating the context structure model from the CSS behavior model. The design process details the main activities related to context specification and the design of CSS, providing a systematic way to execute these tasks. This work also advances the state of the art related to the understanding of the concept of context (and its associated concepts). Three experimental studies were conducted to evaluate the proposal: its instantiation in the design of a context-sensitive Expert Recommender System, its usage by distinct designers on their CSS projects, and a qualitative evaluation of the overall proposal by experienced CSS developers. These studies showed a good acceptance of our approach and indicated the feasibility of using it on real projects.

Towards an Ubiquitous and Context Sensitive Public Transportation System

Transportation systems deal with dynamic and sometimes inconstant scenarios, which could involve events like traffic jams or accidents. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) should be projected in a way that their behavior changes according to the real world that can be pictured surrounding it. Context is what allows the understanding of this dynamicity and how it impacts the way people decide to use the available transportation. This paper presents UbiBus, a system that aims to integrate the concepts of Computational Context and Ubiquitous Computing into the ITS domain. It considers the mobility of people and vehicles and the occurrence of dynamic factors that could affect the transportation and provide passengers with advanced information about the available public transportation in a city (e.g. the estimated arrival time of a bus, according to its current location and a given bus station, or route and bus recommendations according to the different needs of a passenger at a certain time). To verify the viability of the proposed ideas we developed an application that provides the current location and estimated arrival time of a bus. This application was evaluated after real data collection involving a route created for the city of Salvador, Bahia, which showed the potential of the proposed solution.

A process for the design of Context-Sensitive Systems

Context-Sensitive Systems (CSS) demand that designers consider new aspects and challenges in comparison to traditional applications. In a preliminary experiment, we observed that developers have difficulties when including the concept of context in their applications. This paper presents a CSS Design Process, which details the main activities for context specification and the design of CSS and provides a systematic way to execute these tasks. Two studies were conducted to evaluate the process usage: a detailed execution of each defined activity on the design of a context-sensitive Expert Recommender System; and an evaluation of the process usage by distinct designers on their CSS projects. These studies showed a good acceptance of our proposal and indicated the feasibility of using the process on real projects.

Information visualization for emergency management

We report a mapping study to analyze visualization tools in emergency management.Map the area (scientific community and the contributions published in the literature).We point common visualization techniques, environments and phases.Existent literature provides only partial solutions.Findings can support on proposing new approaches to solve open problems in the area. Background: Emergency management (EM) refers to the ability to deal with emergency tasks in different phases and iterations. To do this, each task requires many and different types of information coming from several sources related to the incident. As people working in an emergency situation are generally under stress and have to make quick and effective decisions, they need to assimilate the received information in an easy and intuitive way. Information visualization (InfoVis) is the study of visual representations of abstract data to reinforce human cognition to understand these data through 2D computer screens. It is frequently used to analyze and understand the huge amount of multidimensional data produced in an emergency.Objective: This study analyzes how researchers use information visualization tools to improve emergency management. Our general objective is to map the area examining both the scientific community and the contributions that have been published in the literature, aiming to provide information, such as: understanding how the area is structured, common practices in existing works, and research gaps.Methods: A systematic mapping study was conducted to analyze the available information visualization tools and their applications in EM activities. A thorough search was carried out and a formal selection process was applied to gather all relevant articles on the subject. Selected primary studies were classified and analyzed with respect to their metadata and to answer eight research questions related to our mapping goal. In total, 196 studies were analyzed in depth.Results: The mapping study identified the most common visualization techniques applied in emergency management, the common environments and phases where they are applied, identifying gaps and also possible trends in the subject. We found out that particular issues concerning emergency management are not fully covered by existing visualization approaches, and when covered, existing literature provides only partial solutions.Conclusion: Our results provide a deep analysis on the application of InfoVis in the EM area, supporting researchers and developers in EM systems with insightful information on trending techniques in use, command practices and existing research gaps. We expect that these findings can support them on proposing new approaches to solve open problems in the area.

A context simulator as testing support for mobile apps

Context-aware mobile applications gain more and more influence on our daily life. Since mobile devices are equipped with various sensors to detect their environment, it is possible to receive and process information from beyond application and device borders. Within the development, these context-aware applications have to be verified to assure that they do not cause any failures. This contribution outlines challenges of testing context-aware mobile applications relating to their context factors and present our approach for a context simulator that provides support for modeling and simulation of context in different levels: physical and logical context, situations and scenarios. The simulator supports test case derivation and enables test case execution for several context sources as part of testing mobile applications.

Focused Quality Assurance of Mobile Applications: Evaluation of a Failure Pattern Classification

Mobile applications require quality assurance approaches tailored to their peculiarities, such as context awareness and platform diversity. Furthermore, time limitations and budget restrictions in mobile application development are typical characteristics that need to be addressed. In a prior work, we proposed the usage of a mobile-specific failure pattern classification to focus quality assurance of mobile applications in order to achieve higher quality assurance effectiveness. In this contribution, we evaluate whether the proposed classification is reliable with regard to its effectiveness for finding quality issues, its completeness in terms of fault and failure classes, and its adequacy when used in a methodological approach. To this aim, we performed three experimental studies: a survey consulting experts of this field, a case study performed in industry, and project comparisons performed by analyzing issue tickets of several open-source mobile application projects. The overall results showed that the classification is reliable due to its effectiveness in finding failures of mobile applications during testing. However, each evaluation phase identified several possible extensions, which were added right after each evaluation study. Besides, the classification was confirmed as being well structured for use as part of a methodological approach.

Towards a Lightweight Approach for On-site Interaction Evaluation of Safety-critical Mobile Systems

Abstract The infrastructure organization of large-scale events involves high safety requirements for the visitors and is a central issue for the officials in charge. To assist in dealing with this, we developed the RESCUER app, which runs on smartphones and allows the crowd to report about an emergency, thereby improving the process for rescuing humans in an emergency. For the evaluation of the app, we faced the problem that people participating in a large event, such as a soccer match, are not willing to spend time on completing a long survey or interview. Hence, the goal of this contribution was to select and perform an on-site mobile evaluation approach that fits this context and allows us to evaluate the user interaction. The evaluation took place during the FIFA World Cup 2014 and tested the usability of the app with 112 users in Brazil and in Germany. As a result of the evaluation, we found severe usability issues and concrete insights into how to solve them. For our evaluation approach, it means that on-site mobile evaluation is an appropriate method for improving the usability and interaction of safety-critical software systems.

An Approach for Evaluating and Improving the Test Processes of Mobile Application Developments

Abstract Mobile applications have become highly pervasive in recent years. Assuring the quality of mobile applications is a highly relevant issue since application failures can lead to serious consequences, such as damage of corporate reputation or financial loss. Several obstacles exist in testing mobile applications (e.g., lack of time, absence of methods, limited budget). Our goal in this work is to investigate how we can enhance the effectiveness of testing processes applied by companies developing mobile applications. To do so, it is necessary to identify where applied industrial testing processes are actually missing in order to provide countermeasures. Our approach comprises a set of previously selected mobile testing requirements, which enable the investigation and rating of the applied testing processes based on the fulfillment of these requirements. Elicitation is done via a systematic interview of a company based on a defined questionnaire. Identified failures of selected mobile application projects are then related to the set of mobile testing requirements, and the severity of unfulfilled testing requirements is determined. Finally, we recommend to this company a set of countermeasures for unfulfilled testing requirements that may lead to crucial failures. We evaluated this approach by applying it together with eight software companies in Germany and in Brazil, followed by two surveys: one right after the interview to evaluate the acceptance of the approach, and another one after the post-processing and recommendations phase. The evaluation showed the acceptance of our approach and the expected enhancement of the effectiveness of the companies’ mobile testing processes.

Visualization mechanisms for crowdsourcing information in emergency coordination

To perform emergency coordination, people in a command centre need to process a large amount of data about the incident to make decisions, generally, under time pressure. A main challenge is to quickly obtain contextual information about the situation, which can be obtained from people in the place of the incident, in a crowdsourcing manner. This paper presents our investigation about visualization mechanisms to support command centres on analysing crowdsourcing information regarding emergency situations. As contributions, we highlight: 1) discussion of existing visualization mechanisms and their support on emergency management; 2) prototype of the Emergency Response Toolkit (ERTK), a set of tools to support command centres on using information from the crowd, e.g. in large-scale events; and 3) evaluation of ERTK and its visualization mechanisms with 11 emergency experts, in Brazil, Austria and Spain, collecting feedback to improve information visualization for emergency management.

Towards a Perspective-Based Usage of Mobile Failure Patterns to Focus Quality Assurance

The use of mobile applications for business tasks calls for effective quality assurance during development to prevent potential failures of the mobile application and the consequential costs. Essential activities of quality assurance are to inspect the requirements specification and to test the realized mobile application. Both activities ideally benefit from the knowledge of typical failure patterns in order to guide quality assurance engineers and to focus the quality assurance, i.e., to direct the attention of quality assurance on these failure patterns. For this purpose, a mobile-specific failure pattern classification was derived in previous work. In this paper, we introduce an initial quality assurance approach, which considers inspection and testing in a combined way and methodically uses the classification within the mobile context. The developed method FIT4Apps, which is based on the flexible, efficient reading technique perspective-based reading, allows purposeful use of the proposed failure pattern classification. As proof of concept, we developed a tool prototype, which generates basic perspective-based scenarios considering the derived failure pattern classification in order to support inspection and testing activities.