Adapt cases: extending use cases for adaptive systems

Abstract

Adaptivity is prevalent in today's software. Mobile devices self-adapt to available network connections, washing machines adapt to the amount of laundry, etc. Current approaches for engineering such systems facilitate the specification of adaptivity in the analysis and the technical design. However, the modeling of platform independent models for adaptivity in the logical design phase remains rather neglected causing a gap between the analysis and the technical design phase. To overcome this situation, we propose an approach called Adapt Cases. Adapt Cases allow the explicit modeling of adaptivity with domain-specific means, enabling adaptivity to gather attention early in the software engineering process. Since our approach is based on the concept of use cases it is easy adoptable in new and even running projects that use the UML as a specification language, and additionally, can be easily incorporated into model-based development environments.