Towards Requirements Engineering for Context Adaptive Systems

Building realistic end user scenarios for ubiquitous computing applications entails large up-front investments. Many context adaptive applications so far fail to live up to their expectations. Firstly, this is due to poorly conceived development tools and methods compared to other, more mature domains. And secondly, they seem to be particularly prone to problems related to a discrepancy between user expectation and systems behavior. This unwanted behavior prevents the vision of an emerging trend of context aware and adaptive applications in ubiquitous computing to become reality. A good understanding of business and customer's requirements may be of immense importance. This paper presents a model-based requirements engineering approach to systematically analyze and specify the basic system behavior as well as the adaptation behavior starting from customer and business needs.