Dealing with variability in context-aware mobile software

Abstract

Mobile context-aware software pose a set of challenging requirements to developers as these applicationsexhibit novel features, such as handling varied sensing devices and dynamically adapting to theuser’s context (e.g. his or her location), and evolve quickly according to technological advances.In this paper, we discuss how to handle variability both across different domains and during the evolutionof a single application. We present a set of design structures for solving different problems relatedwith mobility (such as location sensing, behaviour adaptation, etc.), together with the design rationaleunderlying them, and show how these sound micro-architectural constructs impact on variability. Ourpresentation is illustrated with case studies in different domains.