Software Engineering for IoT-Driven Data Analytics Applications
This addresses a gap in software engineering for IoT data analytics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks and taxonomies.
The paper tackles the lack of systematic software engineering processes for IoT-driven data analytics applications by empirically deriving a framework to evaluate and select processes, applying it to 16 processes and a healthcare case study.
Internet of Things Driven Data Analytics (IoT-DA) has the potential to excel data-driven operationalisation of smart environments. However, limited research exists on how IoT-DA applications are designed, implemented, operationalised, and evolved in the context of software and system engineering life-cycle. This article empirically derives a framework that could be used to systematically investigate the role of software engineering (SE) processes and their underlying practices to engineer IoT-DA applications. First, using existing frameworks and taxonomies, we develop an evaluation framework to evaluate software processes, methods, and other artefacts of SE for IoT-DA. Secondly, we perform a systematic mapping study to qualitatively select 16 processes (from academic research and industrial solutions) of SE for IoT-DA. Thirdly, we apply our developed evaluation framework based on 17 distinct criterion (a.k.a. process activities) for fine-grained investigation of each of the 16 SE processes. Fourthly, we apply our proposed framework on a case study to demonstrate development of an IoT-DA healthcare application. Finally, we highlight key challenges, recommended practices, and the lessons learnt based on framework's support for process-centric software engineering of IoT-DA. The results of this research can facilitate researchers and practitioners to engineer emerging and next-generation of IoT-DA software applications.