Towards Envisaging Software Testing in a Pervasive Computing World

Pervasive computing has been increasingly finding its way into mainstream. Such paradigm has been fostering the development of systems that transparently interact with users, push context awareness further, and are able to deal with aspects of the user´s day-to-day experience. Pervasive systems have been constantly and invisibly introduced in our everyday lives, moving us towards a pervasive computing world. Therefore, in this paper we argue that there is a need to prepare for the challenges that such paradigm will bring about. As dependability is a key feature in pervasive environments, we highlight some of these challenges in the light of software testing, which will play an important role on a plausible pervasive computing world. We address this topic by (i) illustrating challenges for testing pervasive software in an example scenario, (ii) describing our outlook on how the tool support for testing pervasive systems will interact with testers and practitioners alike, and (iii) outlining what research thrusts we need to emphasize in order to prepare for this change.