Overview

Software applications in an Internet context are increasingly seen as Software Services, hosted and managed remotely and accessed through diverse platforms. With the advent of wireless technology, in both its wireless LAN and Third Generation (3G) mobile variants, this shift to software as a service is accelerating. The types of services to emerge will be diverse and highly distributed in nature. They will be strongly influenced by current Internet offerings, but also by explosion in mobile phone usage patterns in recent years. The access devices will be varied – including mobile phone/personal digital assistant hybrids, tablet PCs, location sensors, traditional notebooks and as yet unforeseen devices. The software applications (services) will be distributed – with intelligence both in the device, within the network and application servers.

The scope of the NOMAD research programme is the challenges posed to the software development community in building these next generation software services. The project will study this emerging domain from three perspectives: Software Development, Human Factors and Platform Structure.

These three research themes are the specialisms of the SToRC, CCTA and TSSG research groups respectively. Combining their expertise within the NOMAD project enables a holistic view to be taken of a crucially important technological domain. Because of the dynamics generated by this combination, NOMAD has the potential to make a major contribution to the state of the art in next generation software services and applications.

Software Development and Reliability

Significant progress had been made is the understanding of software quality, reliability, and software testing and metrics over the past 10 years. Several generations of software engineering methodologies have been challenged by innovations in the underlying platforms and applications categories. These are about to be challenged again, and NOMAD will be at the forefront in accessing, innovating and testing methodologies for building and verifying the quality of next generation services.

Human Factors

The PC’s role as the dominant human computer interface will recede. It will be replaced by a more diverse set of devices, combining varied ergonomic factors, multimedia input/output, and radically different usage patterns. The interfaces to these “pervasive devices” will require a complete rethink on the part of the software community, which has been developing for a now standardised Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) platform for many years. NOMAD will be studying these interfaces from a strongly human-centred perspective, evaluating and developing services to exercise the true potential of this new technology.

The Structure of the Platform

The platform itself has yet to stabilise. Current adoption of Wireless LAN technology is proceeding rapidly – with inexpensive solutions now available. The 3G world is still in a quite separate technological space, and EU rollout is not expected until 2003/2004. However it is expected that next generation services will be accessible across both sets of technology, and some degree of convergence is assured. NOMAD will deploy test beds and development toolkits to enable wireless services to be built, tested and evaluated. It will also have access to 3G test platforms (via related projects) to facilitate convergence testing across multiple networks.