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Minimizing Nasty Surprises with Better Informed Decision-Making in Self-Adaptive Systems
"... Abstract—Designers of self-adaptive systems often formulate adaptive design decisions, making unrealistic or myopic assumptions about the system’s requirements and environment. The decisions taken during this formulation are crucial for satisfying requirements. In environments which are characterize ..."
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Abstract—Designers of self-adaptive systems often formulate adaptive design decisions, making unrealistic or myopic assumptions about the system’s requirements and environment. The decisions taken during this formulation are crucial for satisfying requirements. In environments which are characterized by uncertainty and dynamism, deviation from these assumptions is the norm and may trigger “surprises”. Our method allows designers to make explicit links between the possible emergence of surprises, risks and design trade-offs. The method can be used to explore the design decisions for self-adaptive systems and choose among decisions that better fulfil (or rather partially fulfil) non-functional requirements and address their trade-offs. The analysis can also provide designers with valuable input for refining the adaptation decisions to balance, for example, resilience (i.e. satisfiability of non-functional requirements and their trade-offs) and stability (i.e. minimizing the frequency of adaptation). The objective is to provide designers of self-adaptive systems with a basis for multi-dimensional what-if analysis to revise and improve the understanding of the environment and its effect on non-functional requirements and thereafter decision-making. We have applied the method to a wireless sensor network for flood prediction. The application shows that the method gives rise to questions that were not explicitly asked before at design-time and assists designers in the process of risk-aware, what-if and trade-off analysis. I.
Towards Crowdsourcing for Requirements Engineering
"... Abstract. Crowdsourcing is an emerging, typically online, distributed problem solving and production model where a problem is solved through the involve-ment of a large number of people. In this study, we investigate the potential of crowdsourcing in aiding Requirements Engineering. Although the who ..."
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Abstract. Crowdsourcing is an emerging, typically online, distributed problem solving and production model where a problem is solved through the involve-ment of a large number of people. In this study, we investigate the potential of crowdsourcing in aiding Requirements Engineering. Although the whole area is still to be explored fully, we focus on the Requirements Elicitation stage. In this paper, we survey the literature on crowdsourcing in a variety of disciplines and deduce a set of features which characterize its main constructs; the crowd and the crowdsourcers. We then conduct two focus groups to explore the relation-ship between these features and the quality of requirements elicited via crowdsourcing. The analysis will lead to a number of hypotheses to confirm and enhance in a future research in the area. The ultimate goal is to systematically develop crowdsourcing platforms for Requirements Engineering and guarantee correctness and maximize efficiency.
User-Centric Adaptation of Multi-tenant Services: Preference-Based Analysis for Service Reconfiguration
"... Multi-tenancy is a key pillar of cloud services. It allows dif-ferent tenants to share computing resources transparently and, at the same time, guarantees substantial cost savings for the providers. However, from a user perspective, one of the major drawbacks of multi-tenancy is lack of configura-bi ..."
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Multi-tenancy is a key pillar of cloud services. It allows dif-ferent tenants to share computing resources transparently and, at the same time, guarantees substantial cost savings for the providers. However, from a user perspective, one of the major drawbacks of multi-tenancy is lack of configura-bility. Depending on the isolation degree, the same service instance and even the same service configuration may be shared among multiple tenants (i.e. shared multi-tenant ser-vice). Moreover tenants usually have different- and in most of the cases- conflicting configuration preferences. To over-come this limitation, this paper introduces a novel approach to support user-centric adaptation in shared multi-tenant services. The adaptation objective aims to maximise ten-ants ’ satisfaction, even when tenants and their preferences change during the service life-time. This paper describes how to engineer the activities of the MAPE loop to sup-port user-centric adaptation, and focuses on the analysis of tenants ’ preferences. In particular, we use a game theoretic analysis to identify a service configuration that maximises tenants ’ preferences satisfaction. We illustrate and motivate our approach by utilising a multi-tenant desktop scenario. Obtained experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed analysis.
Digital Addiction: a Requirements Engineering Perspective
"... Abstract. [Context and motivation] Digital Addiction, (hereafter referred to as DA), has become a serious issue that has a diversity of socio-economic side effects. [Question/problem] In spite of its high importance, DA got little recognition or guidance as to how software engineering should take i ..."
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Abstract. [Context and motivation] Digital Addiction, (hereafter referred to as DA), has become a serious issue that has a diversity of socio-economic side effects. [Question/problem] In spite of its high importance, DA got little recognition or guidance as to how software engineering should take it into account. This is in stark contrast to other domains known for traditional addiction (e.g., drugs, gambling, and alcohol) in which there are clear rules and policies on how to manufacture, market and sell the products. [Principal ideas/results] In this position paper, we suggest that software engineering in general and requirements engineering in particular need to consider DA as a first class concept in developing software systems. [Contribution] As an early step in this area, we conduct an empirical investigation of DA by reviewing the literature and analysing web discussion forums on the topic and use that to design a mind-map of its main causes. We also provide a basic model to articulate the DA problem from requirements perspective and elaborate research challenges for a future work.
User-centric Adaptation Analysis of Multi-tenant Services
, 2015
"... Multi-tenancy is a key pillar of cloud services. It allows different users to share computing and virtual re-sources transparently, meanwhile guaranteeing substantial cost savings. Due to the trade-off between scala-bility and customisation, one of the major drawbacks of multi-tenancy is limited con ..."
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Multi-tenancy is a key pillar of cloud services. It allows different users to share computing and virtual re-sources transparently, meanwhile guaranteeing substantial cost savings. Due to the trade-off between scala-bility and customisation, one of the major drawbacks of multi-tenancy is limited configurability. Since users may often have conflicting configuration preferences, offering the best user experience is an open challenge for the service providers. Besides, the users, their preferences and the operational environment may change during the service operation, jeopardising the satisfaction of user preferences. In this paper we present an approach to support user-centric adaptation of multi-tenant services. We describe how to engineer the ac-tivities of the MAPE (Monitoring, Analysis, Planning, Execution) loop to support user-centric adaptation, and focus on the adaptation analysis. Our analysis computes a service configuration that optimises user satisfaction, complies with infrastructural constraints, and minimises reconfiguration obtrusiveness when user or service related changes take place. To support our analysis, we model multi-tenant services and user preferences by using feature and preference models, respectively. We illustrate our approach by utilising different cases of virtual desktops. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the analysis in improving user preferences satisfaction in a negligible time.
Configuring Crowdsourcing for Requirements
"... Abstract—Crowdsourcing is an emerging paradigm which utilises the power of the crowd in contributing information and solving problems. Crowdsourcing can support requirements elicitation, especially for systems used by a wide range of users and working in a dynamic context where requirements evolve r ..."
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Abstract—Crowdsourcing is an emerging paradigm which utilises the power of the crowd in contributing information and solving problems. Crowdsourcing can support requirements elicitation, especially for systems used by a wide range of users and working in a dynamic context where requirements evolve regularly. For such systems, traditional elicitation methods are typically costly and limited in catering for the high diversity, scale and volatility of requirements. In this paper, we advocate the use of crowdsourcing for requirements elicitation and investigate ways to configure crowdsourcing to improve the quality of elicited requirements. To confirm and enhance our argument, we follow an empirical approach starting with two focus groups involving 14 participants, users and developers, followed by an online expert survey involving 34 participants from the Requirements Engineering community. We discuss our findings and present a set of challenges of applying crowdsourcing to aid requirements engineering with a focus on the elicitation stage. Keywords—Crowdsourcing, Requirements Elicitation, Crowd-based Elicitation. I.
Creating Socially Adaptive Electronic Partners Interaction, Reasoning and Ethical Challenges
"... Technology for supporting people in their daily lives such as per-sonal assistant agents and smart homes carry great potential for making our lives more connected, healthy, efficient and safe by ex-ecuting tasks on our behalf and guiding our actions. We make two key observations: 1) supportive techn ..."
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Technology for supporting people in their daily lives such as per-sonal assistant agents and smart homes carry great potential for making our lives more connected, healthy, efficient and safe by ex-ecuting tasks on our behalf and guiding our actions. We make two key observations: 1) supportive technology is inherently social in the sense that its support to a user is subject to norms from people in the user’s social context (e.g., family members and caregivers), and 2) existing supportive technology is rigid in its realization of this social nature by hardwiring norms into the technology. This rigidity leads to violation of unsupported norms and inflexibility in dealing with violation of supported norms. In this paper we ar-gue that supportive technology should be able to adapt to diverse and evolving norms of people in unforeseen circumstances, in or-der to better support people in their daily lives. We conceptualize this vision by proposing the novel concept of a Socially Adaptive Electronic Partner (SAEP), and outlining interaction, reasoning, and ethical challenges that need to be addressed to realize the creation of SAEPs. This requires techniques that span the areas of norma-tive agents, human-agent teamwork, and ethics of AI, putting the multi-agent systems field in a unique position to do this.
