Requirements reflection: requirements as runtime entities

Nelly Bencomo, Jon Whittle, Peter Sawyer, Anthony Finkelstein, Emmanuel Letier

Research output: Chapter in Book/Published conference outputConference publication

Abstract

Computational reflection is a well-established technique that gives a program the ability to dynamically observe and possibly modify its behaviour. To date, however, reflection is mainly applied either to the software architecture or its implementation. We know of no approach that fully supports requirements reflection- that is, making requirements available as runtime objects. Although there is a body of literature on requirements monitoring, such work typically generates runtime artefacts from requirements and so the requirements themselves are not directly accessible at runtime. In this paper, we define requirements reflection and a set of research challenges. Requirements reflection is important because software systems of the future will be self-managing and will need to adapt continuously to changing environmental conditions. We argue requirements reflection can support such self-adaptive systems by making requirements first-class runtime entities, thus endowing software systems with the ability to reason about, understand, explain and modify requirements at runtime.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICSE '10 Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 2
Place of PublicationNew York, NY (US)
PublisherACM
Pages199-202
Number of pages4
Volume2
ISBN (Print)978-1-60558-719-6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2010
Event32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE '10 - Cape Town, South Africa
Duration: 1 May 20108 May 2010

Conference

Conference32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE '10
Country/TerritorySouth Africa
CityCape Town
Period1/05/108/05/10

Bibliographical note

© ACM 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Bencomo, N, Whittle, J, Sawyer, P, Finkelstein, A & Letier, E 2010, 'Requirements reflection: requirements as runtime entities'. in Proceedings : ICSE '10 Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering. vol. 2, ACM, New York, NY (US), pp. 199-202, 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE '10, Cape Town, South Africa, 1-8 May, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/10.1145/1810295.1810329

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