# Introducing Context Awareness in Unmodified, Context-unaware Software

## TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that unmodified software can be made context-aware through dynamic reconfiguration, significantly expanding its adaptability without altering the original code.

## Contribution

The authors introduce a method to automatically add context awareness to existing software by intercepting and modifying runtime configuration accesses.

## Key findings

- Context awareness can be exploited beyond initial developer intentions.
- Elektra tool effectively intercepts and replaces configuration accesses at runtime.
- Significant potential for improving software adaptability without modification.

## 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.