An Activity Theory-Based Approach for Context Analysis, Design and Evolution

This paper presents a new interdisciplinary approach to support context modeling in context-awareness software developments. The premise of this approach relies on the idea that understanding a complex socio-technical ecology, while adapting the software to its behavior and evolution, is a primary challenge to address. Thus, the paper proposes an activity theory-based approach to aid in the conception, design, development, and evolution of emerging context-aware socio-technical ecologies. The concepts and notations used by the proposed approach are illustrated through a proof of concept that demonstrates the essential ideas and their use in real scenarios. Also, the feasibility of this approach is measured empirically through an experiment. Preliminary results show how, for a context-aware software design and development team, the proposal provides a better understanding of context than alternatives and helps to outline context models by establishing relationships and interactions between socio-technical components and by anticipating potential conflicts among them. The key ideas of the proposed approach result in the ability to analyze and model social and technological contexts around perpetually evolving system ecologies as useful representations for understanding operating environments closely tied to human actions, with software as a mediator component.