Towards a Strategy for Supporting the Engineering of Contemporary Software Systems

Contemporary software systems, such as the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0 and Intelligent Cities, present challenges for their engineering, since they question our traditional form of software development. They represent a promising paradigm for the integration of communication devices and technologies. It is leading to a shift from the classical monolithic view of development where stakeholders receive a software product at the end, to materialized software systems through physical objects interconnected by networks and with embedded smartness to support activities. Therefore, it is necessary to revisit our way of developing software systems and begin to consider the particularities required by these new types of applications. This thesis aims to investigate the particularities of these new types of applications to support the definition of a framework to support decision-making in the engineering of this kind of applications and systems. To this end, we use IoT systems as surrogate for CSS, since they present the contemporaneity and multidisciplinarity that we aim to investigate.Comment: Qualification Exam presented to the Graduate Program in Systems and Computation Engineering, COPPE, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, as part of the requisites required to obtain a Doctorate in Systems Engineering and Computing. Advisors: Guilherme Horta Travassos, UFRJ Kathia Marcal de Oliveira, UPH