Feed me, feed me: an exemplar for engineering adaptive software

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to deliver improved quality of life for citizens, through pervasive connectivity and quanti ed monitoring of devices, people, and their environ- ment. As such, the IoT presents a major new opportunity for research in adaptive software engineering. However, there are currently no shared exemplars that can support software engineering researchers to explore and potentially address the challenges of engineering adaptive software for the IoT, and to comparatively evaluate proposed solutions. In this paper, we present Feed me, Feed me, an exemplar that represents an IoT-based ecosystem to support food security at di erent levels of granularity: individuals, families, cities, and nations. We describe this exemplar using animated videos which highlight the requirements that have been informally ob- served to play a critical role in the success or failure of IoT- based software systems. These requirements are: security and privacy, interoperability, adaptation, and personalisa- tion. To elicit a wide spectrum of user reactions, we created these animated videos based on the ContraVision empirical methodology [23], which speci cally supports the elicitation of end-user requirements for controversial or futuristic tech- nologies. Our deployment of ContraVision presented our pilot study subjects with an equal number of utopian and dystopian scenarios, derived from the food security domain, and described them at di erent levels of granularity. Our synthesis of the preliminary empirical ndings sug- gests a number of key requirements and software engi- neering research challenges in this area. We o er these to the research community, together with a rich exem- plar and associated scenarios available in both their tex- tual form in the paper and as a series of animated videos (http://sead1.open.ac.uk/fmfm/).