Just Enough, Just in Time, Just for "Me": Fundamental Principles for Engineering IoT-native Software Systems
This research targets software engineers and developers working on IoT systems, offering foundational principles to improve design and deployment, but it is incremental as it builds on existing discussions of IoT challenges without introducing new methods or data.
The authors tackled the challenges of IoT software projects by proposing three fundamental principles—just enough, just in time, and just for 'me'—to guide the engineering of IoT-native software systems, aiming to address issues like resource limits and technology heterogeneity.
By seamlessly integrating everyday objects and by changing the way we interact with our surroundings, Internet of Things (IoT) is drastically improving the life quality of households and enhancing the productivity of businesses. Given the unique IoT characteristics, IoT applications have emerged distinctively from the mainstream application types. Inspired by the outlook of a programmable world, we further foresee an IoT-native trend in designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining software systems. However, although the challenges of IoT software projects are frequently discussed, addressing those challenges are still in the "crossing the chasm" period. By participating in a few various IoT projects, we gradually distilled three fundamental principles for engineering IoT-native software systems, such as just enough, just in time, and just for "me". These principles target the challenges that are associated with the most typical features of IoT environments, ranging from resource limits to technology heterogeneity of IoT devices. We expect this research to trigger dedicated efforts, techniques and theories for the topic IoT-native software engineering.