Seite - 23 - in Intelligent Environments 2019 - Workshop Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Intelligent Environments

technical side and to a lesser extent on project management. It does not explicitly define project planning and control activities such as work breakdown structure, statement of work and risk management. On the other hand, the evaluation framework addresses both technical and project management aspects equally. Project planning would lead to better coordination of efforts, especially if the project is large, and identification of critical activities. Risk management is particularly important for IEs as it would allow to mitigate potential risks with unproven technologies. UC-IEDP is flexible enough to accommodate an iterative, linear or incremental system development model. In the project described in Section 5, an iterative approach was adopted. This allowed accepting changes in requirements as the system evolved. The stakeholders were also kept in the loop and their regular feedbacks were particularly instrumental towards informing the development of the irrigation system. A downside to this approach is unavoidable delays if stakeholders are not available. On the other hand, the evaluation framework follows a waterfall like approach. Compared to UC-IEDP, end users experience the prototype system quite late during the engineering stage. In both approaches, several potential concepts are considered before one is chosen principally by the stakeholders. However, the evaluation framework recommends carrying out modeling and simulations to analyse the behavior of the potential systems to better inform the decision process. This is particularly important for IEs whereby system developers can gain an understanding of how the systems will behave even before they exist. The selected option is then subject to more elaborate designs. Additionally, the evaluation framework advises on defining metrics such as measures of effectiveness which, according to [21], leads to establishment of more meaningful and verifiable system requirements. It also helps to define better testing criteria for the system. However, UC-IEDP methodology does not particularly enforce such requirements and is not explicit on which quality attributes to measure and assess against once the system has been developed. [25] identified that quality attributes have a big impact on the usability of Ambient Assisted Living Systems and this is definitely an area to improve for IEs. According to Lehman’s law of continuing change, any system will undergo continual change. Usage of the system will entail additional functionality even though the system has fulfilled all auditing requirements. Systems are also subject to periodic upgrades or bugs may crop up post production. However, UC-IEDP does not offer any guidance how configuration management should be handled. 7. Limitations A known limitation of the presented study is that UC-IEDP methodology was applied to a small project. Moreover, the impact of the adoption of the evaluation framework was not measured systematically. However, based on lessons learnt through this process, we were able to identify some of the strengths, weaknesses and features of UC-IEDP. 8. Conclusion This study proposes an evaluation framework to scrutinize and evaluate IE methodologies to increase our understanding of their strengths, weaknesses and features. As an initial validation of the framework, we have evaluated the UC-IEDP methodology A.Santokheeetal. /TowardsaGeneralFramework forEvaluating IEs’Methodologies 23