Quality Assurance for Self-Adaptive, Self-Organising Systems (Message from the Workshop Organisers)

Welcome to the first edition of the Workshop on Quality Assurance for Self-adaptive, Self-organising Systems (QA4SASO 2014). Developing self-adaptive, self-organising systems that fulfil the requirements of different stakeholders is no simple matter. Quality assurance is required at each phase of the entire development process, starting from requirements elicitation, agent design, system architecture design, and finally in the implementation, testing, and deployment of the system. The quality of the artefacts from each development phase affects the rest of the system, since all parts are closely related to each other. Furthermore, the shift of adaptation decisions from design-time to run-time - necessitated by the need of the systems to adapt to changing circumstances - makes it difficult, but even more essential, to assure high quality standards in these kind of systems. Accordingly, the analysis and evaluation of these self-systems has to take into account the specific operational context to achieve high quality standards. As a consequence, we like to address the following challenges in the workshop on quality assurance for self-adaptive, self-organising systems: Evolutionary developing system, interleaving mechanisms, uncertainty according the system environment, open system architecture, and large number of system participants. The necessity to investigate this field has already been recognised and addressed in different communities, but there exists so far no platform to bring all these communities together. Therefore, the workshop provides an open stage for discussions about the different aspects of quality assurance for self-adaptive, self-organising systems.