Developing and Testing Pervasive Computing Applications: A Tool-Based Methodology

developing and testing pervasive computing applications: a tool-based methodology Despite much progress, developing a pervasive computing application remains a challenge because of a lack of conceptual frameworks and supporting tools. This challenge involves coping with heterogeneous devices, overcoming the intricacies of distributed systems technologies, working out an architecture for the application, and encoding it into a program. Moreover, testing pervasive computing applications is problematic because it requires acquiring, testing and interfacing a variety of software and hardware entities. This process can rapidly become costly and time-consuming when the target environment involves many entities. This thesis proposes a tool-based methodology for developing and testing pervasive computing applications. Our methodology first provides the DiaSpec design language that allows to define a taxonomy of area-specific building-blocks, abstracting over their heterogeneity. This language also includes a layer to define the architecture of an application. Our tool suite includes a compiler that takes DiaSpec design artifacts as input and generates a programming framework that supports the implementation and testing stages. To address the testing phase, we propose an approach and a tool integrated in our tool-based methodology, namely DiaSim. Our approach uses the testing support generated by DiaSpec to transparently test applications in a simulated physical environment. The simulation of an application is rendered graphically in a 2D visualization tool. We combined DiaSim with a domain-specific language for describing physical environment phenomena as differential equations, allowing a physically-accurate testing. DiaSim has been used to simulate various pervasive computing systems in different application areas. Our simulation approach has also been applied to an avionics system, which demonstrates the generality of our parameterized simulation approach. keywords : Software Architecture, Domain-Specific Language, Generative Programming, Testing, Simulation