In a ubiquitous world requirements are ubiquitous too

The soaring presence of devices that can sense the environment, human activity and social interactions in a ubiquitous fashion, opens the doors to potentially very effective multi-disciplinary research. Battery-powered tiny sensors can be distributed across an area to monitor conditions with very fine granularity. Moreover, mobile phones are powerful sensors that we voluntarily carry throughout our daily life. However, as well as introducing exciting opportunities, these technologies offer many challenges: writing software for these systems is all but obvious due to power, communication and computational constraints as well as to their context dynamicity. In addition, the interactions with the software users (i.e., the non computer scientists “scientists” collaborating in the projects) impose requirements that change the way in which software is conceived, tested and deployed. In this talk I will describe my experience and the lessons learned in two multi-disciplinary projects: collaboration with zoologists for animal monitoring through sensing and with social psychologists for monitoring human interactions through mobile phones. The talk will discuss the ubiquity of requirements when mobile and sensing start being employed.