Towards a Continuous Model-Based Engineering Process for QoS-Aware Self-adaptive Systems

Modern information systems connecting software, physical systems, and people, are usually characterized by high dynamism. These dynamics introduce uncertainties, which in turn may harm the quality of service and lead to incomplete, inaccurate, and unreliable results. In this context, self-adaptation is considered as an effective approach for managing run-time uncertainty. However, classical approaches for quality engineering are not suitable to deal with run-time adaptation, as they are mainly used to derive the steady-state solutions of a system at design-time. In this paper, we envision a Continuous Model-based Engineering Process that makes use of architectural analysis in conjunction with experimentation to have a wider understanding of the system under development. These two activities are performed incrementally, and jointly used in a feedback loop to provide insights about the quality of the system-to-be.