Preparatory Reflections on Safe Context-adaptive Software (Position Paper)

: Mobile technology and the Internet of Things promise to deepen the interaction between people, services, and physical devices. Digital solutions for these prospective computing systems are not only radically changing the user experience but also the software engineering process. Without a doubt, software complexity enormously increases, and prospective systems become challenging to develop, maintain, and verify. The user’s reliance on safety-critical software systems is a serious element in any software engineering process where the absence of bugs must be ensured, and malfunction ruled out. Software that is not safe, i.e., the software’s behavior does not comply with a specification, could cause loss of profits or, in the worst-case, harm people. Software safety is an ongoing but mostly academic research field incorporating formal methods to prove the correctness of a program using mathematical methods. In this spirit, we examine the promising context-aware computing and model-driven development paradigms that have directed the development of fog computing and IoT platforms alike. Furthermore, we aggregate viable requirements for computational context models to be employed both for computation and also reasoning about the correctness of applications.