Friends or Foes? - A Conceptual Analysis of Self-Adaptation and IT Change Management

摘要

Self-Adaptation as a vision promises to enable software systems which can autonomously adapt to changes of their context and requirements. Thus, it facilitates the autonomous evolution of the software without manual intervention. However, in practice we cannot expect that all systems with self-adaptation are developed anew and that all their behavioral aspects are handled in an autonomous manner. Instead an evolutionary approach leading from today's systems to partially self-managed systems is required. To enable such a path, we explore in this paper what a conceptual model and processes for self-adaptation should look like using the current practice in ITIL Change Management as initial reference point. We define the required responsibilities and a generic conceptual object model and map them to the ITIL Change Management roles to evaluate the similarities and differences. Moreover, the implications for the co-existence of self-adaptation and Change Management are discussed. Finally, examples for self-adaptive systems are used to exemplify our concept.