Adaptation as a New Requirement for Software Engineering

The so-called wireless revolution is producing new services based on the concept of mobile computing. We remark how mobile computing technologies call for effective software engineering techniques to design, develop and maintain mobile services, i.e., services that are prepared to continue the distribution of a fixed, agreed-upon quality of service despite of the changes in the location of the client software and the characteristics of the environment. Hence novel paradigms are required for software engineering so as to provide effective system structures for mobile services while keeping the design complexity under control. In this paper we discuss the problem and propose one such structure.