Engineering Adaptive Requirements

Challenges in the engineering of self-adaptive software have been recently discussed and summarised in a seminal research road map. Following it, we focus on requirements engineering issues, with a two-fold, long term objective. The first objective is to support the system analyst to engineer adaptive requirements at requirements-time, the second is to make software able to reason on requirements at run-time in order to enable a goal-oriented adaptation. Along the first objective, in this position paper we propose a characterisation of adaptive requirements. Moreover, we investigate how available techniques aimed at eliciting and specifying domain properties, stakeholders' goals and preferences, can provide a practical support to the analyst while capturing adaptive requirements.