Abstract
Previous chapters explained how pervasive computing systems work. As we are secretly hoping you would also like to build such a system, the story would not be complete without an attempt to show you how this is done in real life. We enter now the field of systems engineering, an interdisciplinary, team-based approach that means to enable the realization of successful systems. In a pervasive computing system, software and hardware are working together, in order to enable the desired functionality. For example, a smart car is a system of interconnected sensors (gyroscopes, odometers , cameras, and LIDARs ), actuators (displays, speakers, brakes, and motors) and software agents (map matching, shortest-path planning, traffic light recognition, pedestrians recognition, and automatic cruise control) that work together with other systems (GPS, traffic control systems, and digital map databases), with the purpose of a safe navigation of its passengers to their destination. In many pervasive computing systems, the physical devices, and even some of the software toolboxes, are ready-made. Therefore, the main challenge consists of developing the complete software application and integrating it with the existing hardware. This is why the main focus in this chapter will be on software. Software is nowadays the product of a team of software engineers. The first thing this software team does is, not as you might think, directly jump into programming. The team first writes down what the product should do, who and how will use it, how much time it will take to build it, what is its architecture, how it will be tested, what can go wrong, etc. This disciplined, engineering-like approach of “making” software, called software engineering , is proved to increase the project success and is benefic when it comes to maintainability and accident analysis. Software engineering is thus a part of system engineering , concerned with all aspects of software production, from system specification to maintenance. This chapter highlights the best practices in system engineering in general, and in software development process, in particular.
Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will use it.
A Murphy Law
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Silvis-Cividjian, N. (2017). Systems Engineering. In: Pervasive Computing. Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51655-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51655-4_7
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