The Role of Context in Extra-functional Verification and Validation

Prof.Antinisca Di Marco

Context-awareness is a first-class attribute of today software systems.

Indeed, applications for mobile devices need to be aware of their context in order to adapt their structure and behavior for offering their services even in case the software and hardware resources are limited and subject to fluctuation.

Context-aware systems demand for new development processes that explicitly consider context and its evolution in their activities. During execution, in fact, the context can change frequently and so drastically that the initial development assumptions are no always valid during system execution. As a consequence, the extra-functional requirements could not be satisfied in some visited context.

Today Extra-functional Verification and Validation techniques used at development time are based on model-based analysis techniques that, while implicitly consider some dimensions of context through input parameters (e.g., processing power, network bandwidth and failure probability, user profile), neglect the interplay among such context attributes (low battery level can demand for a reduced processing rate) and their evolution (context attributes may change along the time).

In this talk we introduce an explicit modeling technique of the context and its evolution and we show

(i) how such modeling framework can be used to enhance non-functional verification and validation techniques and

(ii) how it enables certain types of analysis and reasoning, not feasible with context-agnostic approaches.

Short bio

Since March 2008, Antinisca Di Marco is Assistant Professor at University of L'Aquila.

In January 2015 she got the Associate Professor Habilitation. She is a founder and a Member of the Board of Directors of SMARTLY s.r.l., a SPIN OFF of the University of L'Aquila founded in 2014.

Previously she worked as Research Fellow at the University College London, U.K., and she collaborated as Post-Doc with the Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemi e Produzione and with Dipartimento di Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettronica of the Università di "TorVergata", Roma.

Her main research interests include (early) verification and validation of Quality attributes, performance models and stochastic theory, QoS analysis of autonomic services and context-aware mobile software systems to support software adaptation, bio-inspired adaptation mechanisms and bioinformatics.

She was one of the organizer of the first ARAMIS 2008 workshop and of the Special session on “the quest for case studies” within the 4th International Workshop on Principles of Engineering Service-Oriented Systems (PESOS 2012). She has been the co-Chair of the first Italian Student Contest on Software Engineering (SCORE-it) at the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE2015).