Implementation of Continuous Adaptive Requirements Engineering (CARE) Framework

Abstract

The importance of self-adaptability has emerged as an exciting research area among the software engineering community in recent years. The future software systems are envisioned as self-adaptive. They will respond in a satisfactory manner to the changes in the system’s requirements or context. Service-Based Applications (SBA) are self-adaptive applications which have to respond in a satisfactory manner at run time whenever there is a change in user preferences, needs or context by selecting suitable third party web services available on internet. Requirements Engineering (RE) for such applications is different from conventional RE for non-adaptive systems. Design time requirements soon get out-of-date and continuous addition of new requirements or modification of existing requirements is needed which a real challenge for requirements engineering. There is a dire need to introduce new architectures and frameworks in this area. In [12] and [13], a novel conceptual architecture for SBA is proposed under the title of ‘Continuous Adaptive Requirements Engineering (CARE) framework’ for capturing user requirements and system adaptation at runtime by incorporating these new user requirements. However, implementation of this framework is yet to be done. This research thesis is about the implementation of CARE framework by figuring out the efficient methods and techniques which will eventually lead to a seamless adaptation of user and system requirements at runtime. My research has two main objectives: -First, to implement ‘Continuous Adaptive Requirements Engineering (CARE)’ framework by using efficient methods and techniques so that a general purpose middleware is developed that supports runtime adaptation for any self-adaptive service based application in a user-oriented and goal-driven manner. - Second, to provide better assessment of CARE framework by instantiating it through prototype service based application