Requirements-aware systems: a research agenda for RE for self-adaptive systems

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

Research output: Chapter in Book/Published conference outputConference publication

Abstract

Requirements are sensitive to the context in which the system-to-be must operate. Where such context is well-understood and is static or evolves slowly, existing RE techniques can be made to work well. Increasingly, however, development projects are being challenged to build systems to operate in contexts that are volatile over short periods in ways that are imperfectly understood. Such systems need to be able to adapt to new environmental contexts dynamically, but the contextual uncertainty that demands this self-adaptive ability makes it hard to formulate, validate and manage their requirements. Different contexts may demand different requirements trade-offs. Unanticipated contexts may even lead to entirely new requirements. To help counter this uncertainty, we argue that requirements for self-adaptive systems should be run-time entities that can be reasoned over in order to understand the extent to which they are being satisfied and to support adaptation decisions that can take advantage of the systems' self-adaptive machinery. We take our inspiration from the fact that explicit, abstract representations of software architectures used to be considered design-time-only entities but computational reflection showed that architectural concerns could be represented at run-time too, helping systems to dynamically reconfigure themselves according to changing context. We propose to use analogous mechanisms to achieve requirements reflection. In this paper we discuss the ideas that support requirements reflection as a means to articulate some of the outstanding research challenges.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE '10)
PublisherIEEE
Pages95-103
Number of pages9
ISBN (Print)978-1-4244-8022-7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2010
Event18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference - Sydney, Australia
Duration: 27 Sept 20101 Oct 2010

Publication series

NameInternational requirements engineering conference: proceedings
PublisherIEEE
ISSN (Print)1090-705X

Conference

Conference18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CitySydney
Period27/09/101/10/10

Bibliographical note

© 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

Keywords

  • requirements
  • reflection
  • run-time
  • self-adaptive systems

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