The Role of Environmental Deviations in Engineering Robust Systems

Software systems are developed with various assumptions about the environment. However, over time, the environment may evolve and deviate from its expected behavior, possibly undermining desired requirements of the system. In this paper, we argue that identifying and treating environmental deviations as a first-class concept throughout the development cycle is a key to the successful engineering of robust software systems. We describe some examples of environmental deviations in different domains, discuss their implications on development activities, and also put forward research challenges that we believe the requirements engineering community is particularly well-positioned to tackle.