Towards an integrated approach for validating qualities of self-adaptive systems

Self-adaptation has been widely recognized as an effective approach to deal with the increasing complexity and dynamicity of modern software systems. One major challenge in self-adaptive systems is to provide guarantees about the required runtime qualities, such as performance and reliability. Existing research employs formal methods either to provide guarantees about the design of a self-adaptive systems, or to perform runtime analysis supporting adaptations for particular quality goals. Yet, work products of formalization are not exploited over different phases of the software life cycle. In this position paper, we argue for an integrated formally founded approach to validate the required software qualities of self-adaptive systems. This approach integrates three activities: (1) model checking of the behavior of a self-adaptive system during design, (2) model-based testing of the concrete implementation during development, and (3) runtime diagnosis after system deployment. We illustrate the approach with excerpts of an initial study and discuss for each activity research challenges ahead. © 2012 ACM.