A Unified Approach to Model Non-Functional Properties of Mobile Context-Aware Software

Modeling context-awareness is becoming a primary activity for software engineers that design applications for mobile devices. In fact, software applications running on such devices need to be aware of their context (that may rapidly change) to adapt their services and offer the best quality (intended as a combination of non-functional properties) in any context. Thus the need of instruments to manage mobility, context-awareness and non-functional characteristics is critical to build software systems in ubiquitous and mobile domain. In this paper we introduce a framework to uniformly model different types of mobility and context-awareness so that the modeling and analysis of non-functional properties of such systems can be supported in an integrated environment. To enable non-functional analysis, we devise the integration of non-functional parameters in the modeling framework. In particular, we present an UML implementation of our framework within the MagicDraw modeling environment, with the support of existing UML profiles for modeling context-awareness and non-functional properties. We finally show an example of modeling and analysis of reliability in the eHealth domain.