Beyond Context-Oriented Software

The last two decades have seen a lot of research on context-aware and context-oriented software development technologies, across subfields of computer science. This research area is slowly starting to mature and researchers currently explore how to unify di↵erent solutions proposed in these subfields. We envision that within another decade some of these solutions will make it into mainstream software development approaches, tools and environments. Most end-user software built by that time will be context-aware and able to adapt seamlessly to its context of use (devices, surrounding environment, and users’ preferences). This transition from traditional to context-oriented software also requires a mindset shift in users. If users are to accept adaptive systems, they need to be in control. Contextorientation should evolve to become less technologyand more user-centric, putting the user back in control. A first step is to provide good feedback to the user about when and what adaptations take place, and mechanisms to allow users to partly control certain adaptations, followed by easily usable and understandable personalisation mechanisms dedicated to each end user. Eventually, when adaptive systems become completely natural and adopted by end users, this will culminate in our vision where users are in full control of relevant features or adaptations of applications of their interest, selected on-demand from online feature clouds, and integrated automatically into the running system. Copyright c by the paper’s authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. Proceedings of the Seminar Series on Advanced Techniques and Tools for Software Evolution SATToSE2016 (sattose.org), Bergen, Norway, 11-13 July 2016, published at http://ceur-ws.org