Just Enough, Just in Time, Just for "Me": Fundamental Principles for Engineering IoT-native Software Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces three fundamental principles—just enough, just in time, and just for "me"—to guide the engineering of IoT-native software systems, addressing unique IoT challenges.

Contribution

It distills and proposes three core principles specifically tailored for designing, developing, and maintaining IoT-native software systems, filling a gap in current IoT software engineering research.

Findings

Identified key challenges in IoT software development.

Formulated three guiding principles for IoT-native systems.

Aimed to inspire new techniques and theories in IoT software engineering.

Abstract

By seamlessly integrating everyday objects and by changing the way we interact with our surroundings, Internet of Things (IoT) is drastically improving the life quality of households and enhancing the productivity of businesses. Given the unique IoT characteristics, IoT applications have emerged distinctively from the mainstream application types. Inspired by the outlook of a programmable world, we further foresee an IoT-native trend in designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining software systems. However, although the challenges of IoT software projects are frequently discussed, addressing those challenges are still in the "crossing the chasm" period. By participating in a few various IoT projects, we gradually distilled three fundamental principles for engineering IoT-native software systems, such as just enough, just in time, and just for "me". These principles target the challenges that are associated with the most typical features of IoT environments, ranging from resource limits to technology heterogeneity of IoT devices. We expect this research to trigger dedicated efforts, techniques and theories for the topic IoT-native software engineering.