Interdisziplinary development patterns from the use case: Support-U

Abstract

Software development has proven to be a challenge. To address this challenge, there are quite many interesting approaches how to develop software - starting from the waterfall approach, up to recently quite popular agile software development techniques. Another already some years old approach was described by the Gang of Four and proposes the usage of design patterns to provide a general reusable solution to commonly occurring problems in software development. Although design patterns have been around for a long time, their usability is still promising. To the best of our knowledge ”interdisciplinary patterns” to address challenges in the development of context aware application in ubiquitous environments have not been described in literature so far. Hence, this paper proposes and also evaluates concrete interdisciplinary software development patterns. To provide an application example the proposed patterns are used to address two use cases that commonly occur in the development process of context aware applications: providing transparency to the user and ensuring a user's self-determination. For the demonstration of the patterns Support-U a context aware application that provides elderly people to live autonomously is used.