Microservices architectures are presented as the next evolution of the software design. They are particularly applied to scalable and distributed systems, such as IoT (Internet of Things). However, in order to take advantage of the microservices-based design for ubiquitous systems and manage its implications in other phases of the development life cycle there is still a need to address expressiveness in the modelling languages, such as UML. This paper identifies some of the main UML language elements to be extended and/or specialized in order to facilitate the design of microservices-based software for ubiquitous systems. The case study case of an intelligent system to check attendance in a ubiquitous learning environment is used as a way of identifying those UML elements. As a result, this work lays the ground to model affinity between microservices at the design level and generate code and other software artifacts. In the next future, it can also contribute to better automatize software development for microservice-based systems by applying a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) methodology.

In most developed countries, the population is gradually ageing. Due to this, there is an increasing demand for technologies whose design is specifically oriented towards meeting the needs of the elderly. In this paper, we describe a web-based cognitive training tool for elderly people, called VIRTRAEL, which comprises 18 exercises presented in 13 working sessions. In order to reach a high degree of user acceptance, we have applied a user-centred development methodology and a guide defining a set of design principles and usability guidelines specifically intended for older people. Moreover, a usability questionnaire to assess VIRTRAEL has been especially designed to be completed by this type of users. Both guide and questionnaire can be easily applied in other software developments, and especially in those related to the specific domain of cognitive training for this user group. As a means to objectively measure the usability of VIRTRAEL, an EFA (Exploratory Factor Analysis) has been conducted on a 32-item questionnaire with 149 subjects. The results confirm that our proposal is usable and highlight some differences between user groups (female versus male users, and those who live alone versus those living with other people) that should be taken into consideration in future developments.

Mobile systems are gaining more and more importance, and new promising paradigms like Mobile Cloud Computing are emerging. Mobile Cloud Computing provides an infrastructure where data storage and processing could happen outside the mobile node. Specifically, there is a major interest in the use of the services obtained by taking advantage of the distributed resource pooling provided by nearby mobile nodes in a transparent way. This kind of systems is useful in application domains such as emergencies, education and tourism. However, these systems are commonly based on dynamic network topologies, in which disconnections and network partitions can occur frequently, and thus the availability of the services is usually compromised. Techniques and methods from Autonomic Computing can be applied to Mobile Cloud Computing to build dependable service models taking into account changes in the context. In this work, a context-aware software architecture is proposed to support the availability of the services deployed in mobile and dynamic network environments. The proposal is based on a service replication scheme together with a self-configuration approach for the activation/hibernation of the replicas of the service depending on relevant context information from the mobile system. To that end, an election algorithm has been designed and implemented.