Adventures in Adaptation: A Software Engineering Playground!

Abstract

Summary form only given. A long research career has inevitably meant that the focus of our work may appear almost random, meandering through distributed computing, software architectures, requirements engineering and model checking! However, in retrospect, a rational reconstruction suggests that there might have been a thread which binds these research adventures together: that of dealing with change. The need to handle change, particularly at run-time, provides a wonderful set of challenges, making research into adaptive and self-managing systems a playground for software engineering researchers. We need to provide a set of comprehensive, consistent and pragmatic approaches to deal with challenges in aspects such as requirements goals and goal revision, domain modelling and model revision, planning and plan revision, and software configuration and reconfiguration. Based on our experiences, this talk will provide some insight into our approaches and suggest some recommendations for those that enjoy adventure playgrounds.