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M. Raab, G. Barany:
"Introducing Context Awareness in Unmodified, Context-unaware Software";
Talk: ENASE - International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering, Porto, Portugal; 2017-04-28 - 2017-04-29; in: "Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE", ScitePress, Setubal - Portugal (2017), ISBN: 978-989-758-250-9; 218 - 225.

Software tends to be highly configurable, but most applications are hardly context aware.
For example, a web browser provides many settings to configure printers and proxies, but nevertheless it is unable to dynamically adapt to a new workplace.
In this paper we aim to empirically demonstrate that by dynamic and automatic reconfiguration of unmodified software we can systematically introduce context awareness.
In 16 real-world applications comprising 50 million lines of code we empirically investigate which of the 2,683 run-time configuration accesses
(1) already take context into account, or
(2) can be manipulated at run-time to do so.
The results show that context awareness can be exploited far beyond the developers' initial intentions.
Our tool Elektra dynamically intercepts the run-time configuration accesses and replaces them with a context aware implementation.
Users only need to specify contexts and add context sensors to make use of this potential.

Context-aware Software Engineering, Configuration Specification

http://dx.doi.org/10.5220/0006326602180225

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_265525.pdf