Improving impact of self-adaptation and self-management research through evaluation methodology

Today, self-adaptation and self-management approaches to software engineering are viewed as specialized techniques and reach a somewhat limited community. In this paper, I overview the current state and expectation of self-adaptation and self-management impact in industry and in premier publication venues and identify what we, as a community, may do to improve such impact. In particular, I find that common evaluation methodologies make it relatively simple for self-adaptation and self-management research to be compared to other such research, but not to more-traditional software engineering research. I argue that extending the evaluation to include comparisons to traditional software engineering techniques may improve a reader's ability to judge the contribution of the research and increase its impact. Finally, I propose a set of evaluation guidelines that may ease the promotion of self-adaptation and self-management as mainstream software engineering techniques.