On the socially aware development of self-adaptive ubiquitous computing applications

Ubiquitous computing applications provide pervasive support to users in a self-adaptive and non-obtrusive way. Applications reason about the user situation and adapt dynamically, often without explicit user interaction. Such applications exploit technical features such as context awareness, context reasoning, adaptation models, dynamic resource discovery/binding, and self-configuration. The engineering of ubiquitous computing applications is a challenge because the user acceptance depends not only on functional features but at least as much on non-functional and user-related features that we address under the term "social awareness". In this paper we present an interdisciplinary development approach for self-adaptive applications that takes into account social awareness requirements in a systematic and integrated manner. Our focus is on usability, trust, and legality. We present the ingredients of our new methodology and its evaluation based on application prototypes. Our approach is compatible with existing software engineering process models and practices.