Situation-Based Design: A Rapid Approach for Pervasive Application Development

Understanding the user's requirements and intentions is important when developing pervasive applications. It helps making adaptation decisions and satisfying the user's needs. In order to do this, the user's intentions, the current situation and the options for application adaptation have to be taken into account. In this paper we extend prior work on situation modeling and specifying applications with respect to situations. We recapitulate our development language and discuss the development methodology that combines the notion of situation with an application model, thus provides a domain-specific design language and a set of graphical toolkits covering the development lifecycle of a pervasive application. We describe the results from a user study that illustrates the approach and its expressiveness and usability.