Variability Features in Building Approaches for Context-Aware Mobile Applications

Abstract

The growth of mobile applications has been exponential in the last couple of years and it has come with technological advances, such as embedded sensors in mobile devices. This brings out greater challenges in the development of context-aware mobile applications, according to the demands of the current market. Currently, there are building approaches for this kind of applications, but these do not have flexibility in the generated applications. Until now, there is not a unified solution for this kind of applications, so, this is an open research area. This paper presents a taxonomy of variability concepts (Relevance, Combination, Precision and Accuracy's Margins, Configuration Type, and Execution Type) to be taken into account when designing building approaches for context-aware mobile application. When these approaches are designed from scratch considering these variability concepts, this allows generating a wide variety of applications. The contribution of our taxonomy is to help the designer to identify the potential variability points in order to obtain more flexible approaches. The aim is to generate a discussion in relation to the variability concepts of the proposed taxonomy, this provides guidelines to be able to achieve variability in this kind of approaches. We hope this will enrich the discussion in relation to this kind of approaches in order to the unification of features that should be handled by these building approaches to obtain variability.

Towards a New Perspective of Building Tools for Context-Aware Mobile Applications

“…Our building tool for context-aware mobile applications has been designed using the taxonomy of variability concepts described in [ 8 ]. This section describes a survey of the proposed taxonomy [ 8 ], in order to help the reader to better understand how our tool handles variability. In addition, our building tool is based on the UML standard to have more interoperability with other existing tools.…”

“…Thus, the building tool should define the heuristics to handle the behavior based on each category of aware object. Configuration Type : the physical sensors used in context-aware mobile applications have default, passive or active configuration type, according to [ 8 ]. The building tool should handle each configuration type.…”

“…Configuration Type : the physical sensors used in context-aware mobile applications have default, passive or active configuration type, according to [ 8 ]. The building tool should handle each configuration type.…”

“…When different building approaches for context-aware mobile applications are designed from scratch, the designer should identify the potential variability points in order to obtain more flexible tools. A possible way of handling some variability concept was exemplified in [ 8 ] for conceptual building approaches; however, it is not detailed from the building tool’s perspective, so, this is the motivation for the research presented in this paper.…”

“…Therefore, the aim of this paper is to propose a building tool to support variability in while generating applications that have been designed using the taxonomy of variability concepts proposed in [ 8 ]. This tool is based on UML standards in order to have more interoperability with other existing tools.…”