Quality characteristics in IoT systems: learnings from an industry multi case study

The Internet of Things (IoT) has transformed our daily life by enabling devices and objects to collect data, communicate, and collaborate to provision novel types of services. Engineering IoT systems is a complex process that should consider a number of quality characteristics to meet the systems’ goals. Towards identifying the key quality characteristics of IoT systems, in this study, we conduct semi-structured interviews with seven companies developing IoT solutions within smart energy, smart healthcare, smart surveillance, and smart buildings application areas. The study used the ISO/IEC 25010 model as a reference and a qualitative research approach, i.e., we conducted semi-structured interviews with ten experts and performed content analysis on the data collected from the interviews. The study findings reveal that the ISO/IEC 25010 model does not include the following key quality characteristics that practitioners consider when engineering IoT systems: trust, privacy, and energy consumption. Additionally, we report about trade-offs between quality characteristics, architectural constraints, and challenges related to the achievement of the identified quality characteristics when engineering IoT systems in practice.