Unwanted Behavior and its Impact on Adaptive Systems in Ubiquitous Computing

Many ubiquitous computing applications so far fail to live up to their expectations. While working perfectly in controllable laboratory environments, they seem to be particularly prone to problems related to a discrepancy between user expectation and systems behavior when released into the wild. This kind of unwanted behavior of course prevents the vision of an emerging trend of context aware and adaptive applications in mobile and ubiquitous computing to become reality. In this paper, we present examples from our practical work and show why for ubiquitous computing unwanted behavior is not just a matter of enough requirements engineering and good or bad technical system verification. We furthermore provide a classification of the phenomenon and an analysis of the causes of its occurrence and resolvability in context aware and adaptive systems.