On challenges in engineering IoT software systems

Abstract

Contemporary software systems, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Industry 4.0, and Smart Cities represent a technology changing that offer challenges for their construction since they are calling into question our traditional form of developing software. They are a promising paradigm for the integration of devices and communications technologies. It is leading to a shift in the classical monolithic view of development where stakeholders used to receive a software product at the end (that we have been doing for decades), to software systems incrementally materialized through physical objects interconnected by networks and with embedded software to support daily activities. Therefore, we need to revisit the traditional way of developing software and start to consider the particularities required by these new sorts of applications. Since such software systems involve different concerns, this paper presents the results of an investigation towards defining a framework to support the software systems engineering of IoT applications. To support its representation, we evolved the Zachman's Framework as an alternative to the organization of the framework architecture. The filling of such a framework is supported by a) 14 significant concerns of IoT applications, recovered from the technical literature, practitioner's workshops and a Government Report; b) seven structured facets emerged from IoT data analysis, that together represent the engineering challenges to be faced both by researchers and practitioners towards the advancement of IoT in practice.

Social Media Analytics of the Internet of Things

“…The same research found that if QoE is not considered in autonomous IoT applications, poor quality of decisions and resulting actions may occur. Motta et al [23] have examined the IoT-related literature to nd twenty-nine de nitions of the concept. Connectivity, a component of QoE, is among the common concepts within the de nitions Motta et al distilled.…”

A software library model for the internet of things

“…Northrop et al [9] outlined several challenges for "ultra large" scale systems, including constant evolution, inconsistent behavior, and heterogeneity. Motta et al [15] echo these concerns in their survey of IoT stakeholders and emphasize the importance of creating platforms that are easy to understand, extend, and maintain. Newton and Walsh [16] tackle the problem of heterogeneity at scale with a macroprogramming paradigm, in which a single program dictates the functionality of an entire network of devices.…”

Towards a more in-depth understanding of the IoT Paradigm and its challenges

“…In turn, backward and forward snowballing refers to using the reference list of cited papers or the citations to a paper to identify additional sources of data, complementing and extending the initial set of papers (Wohlin, 2014). Also, as far as our experience shows, the strategy of using Scopus with snowballing procedures mitigates an eventual lack of content, avoids duplicated filtering work, and provides a representative set of papers to a characterization study such as this one (Motta, Oliveira, and Travassos 2016;Motta, Oliveira, and Travassos 2018).  Search String -Since the review focus is to retrieve information based on secondary studies, it was: TITLE-ABS-KEY (( "*systematic literature review" OR "systematic* review*" OR "mapping study" OR "systematic mapping" OR "structured review" OR "secondary study" OR "literature survey" OR "survey of technologies" OR "driver technologies" OR "review of survey*" OR "technolog* review*" OR "state of research") AND ( "internet of things" OR "iot")).…”

“…One of the recurrent difficulties regards the natural IoT multidisciplinary and novelty. Since IoT it is a modern paradigm, some fundamental points are still under discussion and involve converging topics of different research streams (Motta, de Oliveira, and Travassos, 2018).…”