Introducing Context Awareness in Unmodified, Context-unaware Software

Markus Raab, Gergö Barany

2017

Abstract

Software tends to be highly configurable, but most applications are hardly context aware. For example, a web browser provides many settings to configure printers and proxies, but nevertheless it is unable to dynamically adapt to a new workplace. In this paper we aim to empirically demonstrate that by dynamic and automatic reconfiguration of unmodified software we can systematically introduce context awareness. In 16 real-world applications comprising 50 million lines of code we empirically investigate which of the 2,683 run-time configuration accesses (1) already take context into account, or (2) can be manipulated at run-time to do so. The results show that context awareness can be exploited far beyond the developers’ initial intentions. Our tool Elektra dynamically intercepts the run-time configuration accesses and replaces them with a context aware implementation. Users only need to specify contexts and add context sensors to make use of this potential.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Raab M. and Barany G. (2017). Introducing Context Awareness in Unmodified, Context-unaware Software . In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-758-250-9, pages 218-225. DOI: 10.5220/0006326602180225

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase17,
author={Markus Raab and Gergö Barany},
title={Introducing Context Awareness in Unmodified, Context-unaware Software},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2017},
pages={218-225},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006326602180225},
isbn={978-989-758-250-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - Introducing Context Awareness in Unmodified, Context-unaware Software
SN - 978-989-758-250-9
AU - Raab M.
AU - Barany G.
PY - 2017
SP - 218
EP - 225
DO - 10.5220/0006326602180225