Avaliação da confiança no funcionamento de sistemas ubíquos usando medidas de qualidade

Abstract

Ubiquitous systems are, in principle, autonomous and capable of perceiving environment, activities and user needs, without having to explicitly determine them. Consequently, in order to use this type of systems, a user needs to trust them. One of the possible techniques to evaluate the user’s trust in the system’s functionalities is using measurements. However, since several quality attributes are involved to assure this characteristic, this is a hard task. Moreover, due to other specific characteristics of ubiquitous systems, such as context-awareness, mobility, and heterogeneity, their quality evaluation becomes more challenging than in traditional systems. With that in mind, this master thesis’ objective is to investigate and, when necessary, adapt and propose software quality measures to evaluate the user’s trust in the functionality of ubiquitous systems (i.e., their dependability) that run in mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, and smart devices). Three case studies are used in this work to evaluate the proposed measures: a mobile visit guide, a cellphone’s call volume control system, and a system to alert and detect falls. The main contribution of this work is to help software quality analysts in the identification of which attributes are impacting the trust of the user in the functionality of a ubiquitous system and, consequently, suggesting improvements to the developers that allow an increase in the acceptance and use of this kind of systems.