Towards a Strategy for Supporting the Engineering of Contemporary Software Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores new engineering strategies for contemporary software systems like IoT and smart cities, emphasizing the need for revised development frameworks due to their interconnected, physical, and intelligent nature.

Contribution

It proposes a framework to support decision-making in the engineering of modern, interconnected software systems, focusing on IoT as a representative example.

Findings

Identifies key particularities of contemporary software systems.

Proposes a decision-support framework for system engineering.

Highlights the importance of multidisciplinary approaches.

Abstract

Contemporary software systems, such as the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0 and Intelligent Cities, present challenges for their engineering, since they question our traditional form of software development. They represent a promising paradigm for the integration of communication devices and technologies. It is leading to a shift from the classical monolithic view of development where stakeholders receive a software product at the end, to materialized software systems through physical objects interconnected by networks and with embedded smartness to support activities. Therefore, it is necessary to revisit our way of developing software systems and begin to consider the particularities required by these new types of applications. This thesis aims to investigate the particularities of these new types of applications to support the definition of a framework to support decision-making in the engineering of this kind of applications and systems. To this end, we use IoT systems as surrogate for CSS, since they present the contemporaneity and multidisciplinarity that we aim to investigate.