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.

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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